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BOOKS 


JOHN   RUSKIN 


THE 
PILGRIM  BOOKS 

General  Editor — 
S.  L.  BENSUSAN 

1.  SHAKESPEARE 

2.  LAMB 

3.  WORDSWORTH 

4.  TENNYSON 

5.  RUSKIN 

6.  WILLIAM   MORRIS 
Others  in  Preparation 


Photo :  Elliott  &*  Fry 


JOHN  RUSKIN 


JOHN  RUSKIN 


HIS  HOMES  AND  HAUNT,S 


BY 


JAMES   D.   SYMON 


WITH   TWELVE  DRAWINGS  IN  CRAYON  BY 

W.   B.   ROBINSON 
AND  OTHER  ILLUSTRATIONS 


NEW   YORK 
DODGE   PUBLISHING   COMPANY 

214-220  EAST   23RD  STREET 


IN   PIAM   MEMORIAM 
OPTIMA  MATRIS 


CONTENTS 

CHAP.  PAGE 

I.  PARENTAGE    AND    CHILDHOOD  —  HUNTER    STREET 

AND  HERNE  HILL     .        *        ..        .        ...        .        .  1 

II.  HERNE  HILL  AND  EXCURSIONS 13 

III.  OXFORD        .        .        .        . 24 

IV.  THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  FAME 32 

V.  "THE  INDUSTRY  OF  MID-LIFE" 38 

VI.  FRANCE,  SWITZERLAND,  AND  ITALY         ....  46 

VII.  OXFORD  ONCE  MORE  :  THE  SLADE  PROFESSOR     .        .  62 

VIII.  GATES  OF  THE  HILLS                                                             .  70 


LIST   OF   ILLUSTRATIONS 

PORTRAIT  OF  RUSKIN Frontispiece 

RUSKIN'S  BIRTHPLACE,  54  HUNTER  STREET,  BRUNS- 
WICK SQUARE,  W.C .    Facing  p.    4 

RUSKIN'S  HOUSE,  No.  28  HERNE  HILL  ....          ,,16 
RUSKIN'S  HOUSE,  DENMARK  HILL         ....          ,,20 

CHAMOUNI  AND  MONT  BLANC 24 

THE  QUADRANGLE  AND  PELICAN,  CORPUS  CHRISTI 

COLLEGE,  OXFORD       .......         „ 

RUSKIN'S  WALK,  DENMARK  HILL          ....          „ 

KINNOULL      .        .        .        .... 

CHRIST  CHURCH,  OXFORD „ 

DANIELI'S  HOTEL,  VENICE 

ENTRANCE  TO  THE  DOGE'S  PALACE,  VENICE    . 
THE  MOAT  OF  NUREMBERG.    DRAWING  BY  JOHN 

RUSKIN ,,&2 

CONISTON  WATER  AND  THE  OLD  MAN       ...          ,,66 

BRANTWOOD,  CONISTON ,,60 

LOIRE-SIDE,  BY  RUSKIN,  AFTER  TURNER  ...          ,,64 
THE   BRIDGE   OF   RHEINFELDEN   ON  THE   RHINE; 

BY  RUSKIN,  AFTER  TURNER ,,68 


PREFACE 

THIS  essay  is  obviously  an  outline;  it  could  not  be 
otherwise  when  the  story  of  eighty  years  had  to  be 
told  in  eighty  pages.  The  reader  will  find  little  that 
is  new  save  an  anecdote  here  and  there ;  but  the  treat- 
ment, as  regards  locality,  has  at  least  the  freshness  of 
its  attempt  to  describe  places  and  scenes  not  as  they 
may  appear  to  the  independent  observer  to-day,  but 
as  they  appeared  to  Ruskin  himself. 

The  principal  authority  has  therefore  been  the 
works  of  John  Ruskin,  in  their  compass.  Quota- 
tions not  directly  acknowledged  in  the  text  are  from 
Prceterita.  Elsewhere  the  sources  are  indicated.  The 
author  also  acknowledges  much  valuable  help  from 
the  biographical  notes  of  Mr.  Cook  and  Mr.  Wedder- 
burn  in  the  Library  Edition  of  Ruskin,  as  well  as 
from  the  short  biographies  of  Mr.  Collingwood  and 
Mr.  Frederic  Harrison.  On  many  critical  points  he 
has  consulted,  always  with  illumination,  even  where 
complete  agreement  was  denied  him,  the  invaluable 
monograph  of  Mrs.  Meynell,  and  that  of  Mr.  J.  M. 
Mather.  In  justice  to  himself,  he  may  perhaps  confess 
that  these  pages  were  passed  for  press  before  he  read 
Dean  Kitchin's  "  Ruskin  at  Oxford." 

Cordial  thanks  are  due  to  Mr.  John  Leith  for  his 
kindness  in  lending  for  reproduction  a  memorable 
letter  of  Ruskin's. 

J.  D.  S. 


Yli 


JOHN    RUSKIN 


CHAPTER   I 

PARENTAGE  AND   CHILDHOOD— HUNTER  STREET 
AND    HERNE   HILL 

AT  the  birth  of  John  Ruskin,  the  Fates  that  spin  the 
destinies  of  Art  and  Letters  must  have  sung  harmo- 
niously to  their  spindles.  For  seldom  has  a  man  of 
genius  been  so  favoured  by  fortune  as  the  child  who 
was  born  to  John  James  Ruskin  and  his  wife  Margaret 
on  February  8,  1819,  at  54  Hunter  Street,  Brunswick 
Square.  An  only  child,  he  was  from  the  beginning 
marked  out  as  one  apart :  his  forbears  were  no  ordinary 
people ;  his  training  was  to  be  peculiar ;  above  all,  he 
was  to  be  spared  that  which  is  at  once  the  handicap 
and  the  spur  of  great  abilities,  a  fight  with  adversity. 
He  was,  it  is  true,  to  become  in  after  years  a  com- 
batant among  combatants,  to  fight  gallantly  for  truth, 
and  to  pass  away  grieving  that  the  complete  victory 
he  had  sought  was  denied  him ;  but  in  the  early  years 
no  cloud  obscured  his  growing  powers.  He  grew  up 
like  some  rare  and  curious  flower  in  a  garden  closed 
and  sheltered  from  the  storms  of  the  world,  nurtured 

A 


2  JOHN    RUSKIN 

certainly  with  a  strange  spiritual  rigour,  on  his  mother's 
part ;  but  that  high  austerity,  unknown  to  the  children 
of  a  more  favoured  age,  was  tempered  and  qualified  by 
the  humanity  and  culture  of  his  father. 

Between  them,  John  Ruskin's  parents  exercised 
upon  their  son  forces  differing  in  degree  and  in  direc- 
tion, and  the  resultant  was  the  critic  and  stylist.  A 
third  force  was  that  of  surroundings,  in  a  merely 
topographical  sense,  and  in  a  certain  sense  no  other 
English  writer  has  been  so  much  the  product  and  the 
expression  of  that  which  lay  about  his  path.  For  the 
most  part  the  dwelling-places  of  men  of  genius  have 
been  an  accident ;  for  John  Ruskin,  as  the  event 
proved,  they  were  an  essential.  It  is  said  that 
"home-keeping  youth  has  ever  homely  wits."  John 
Ruskin,  a  home-keeper  as  few  men  have  been,  in  the 
respect  that  he  continued  to  live  with  his  parents  even 
until  manhood  was  well  advanced,  managed  to  disprove 
the  proverb.  But  this  close  tie  to  the  parental  roof 
and  to  the  society  of  his  father  and  mother,  although 
a  tether,  was  a  tether  of  elastic  that  stretched  first 
over  England  and  Scotland,  and  afterwards  across  the 
continent  of  Europe.  The  Ruskins  were  the  last  to 
cling  to  the  ideal  method  of  travel,  that  of  the  post- 
chaise,  and  their  gentle  and  joyous  passages  through- 
out the  length  and  breadth  of  the  land  gave  the  boy 
a  temper  and  an  experience  that  are  inseparably  inter- 
woven with  his  character.  Ruskin  is  par  excellence  the 
English  writer  whose  career  and  development  are  best 
illuminated  by  a  study  of  his  Homes  arid  Haunts,  and 


PARENTAGE  AND  CHILDHOOD  3 

that  is  the  theme  and  purpose  of  the  present  essay 
in  little. 

By  birth  a  Londoner,  John  Ruskin  was  essentially  a 
Scotsman  by  descent  and  early  training.  The  heritage 
of  his  blood  brought  him  in  full  measure  the  qualities 
and  the  defects  of  the  Northern  character,  wherein 
natural  breadth  contends  ever  with  an  imposed  rigidity. 
In  his  parents  severally  these  characteristics  were  per- 
sonified :  the  father  a  strenuous  man  of  business, 
devoted  to  the  arts  and  somewhat  nebulous  in  his 
religion ;  the  mother  of  the  straitest  sect  of  the 
Evangelicals,  but  with  a  certain  gracious,  if  some- 
what restricted,  enthusiasm  for  the  gentler  flowers  of 
the  mind.  She  had  striven  during  the  long  years 
of  her  engagement  to  make  herself  the  fitting  com- 
panion of  the  man  she  was  to  marry,  a  man  whose 
education  was  superior  to  her  own,  and  the  Fates 
had  ordained  that  that  effort  of  hers  was  to  find  a 
strange  issue  in  moulding  the  mind  of  a  boy  who 
was  afterwards  to  write  his  name  indelibly  on  the 
page  of  English  Literature  and  on  the  artistic  de- 
velopment of  the  world.  There  are  some  who  have 
held  that  Mrs.  Ruskin's  methods  are  open  to  criticism, 
but  surely  her  wisdom  is  justified  of  its  child  ?  Her 
rigorous  instructions  in  the  text  of  the  English  Bible 
may  sound  terrible  to  this  age,  but  they  laid  the 
foundations  of  that  sense  of  language  which  framed 
the  melodious  close  of  Ruskin's  periods.  To  the 
Authorised  Version  he  owed  more  than  to  disorgan- 
ising Gibbon  or  judicious  Hooker.  But  when  all  is 


4  JOHN    RUSKIN 

said  and  done,  models  and  masters  play  but  a  secon- 
dary part.  "The  style,"  as  Buffon  did  not  say,  "is 
the  man  himself."  It  is  with  the  man  that  we  have 
here  principally  to  do. 

Like  most  Scotsmen  of  account,  John  Ruskin  had 
a  pedigree.  It  is  interesting,  but  too  elaborate,  too 
full  of  side  issues  to  be  detailed  here.  There  is  a 
remote  link  with  the  Sir  Andrew  Agnew  of  the  memor- 
able speech  at  Dettingen,  another  with  Ross  the  Arctic 
explorer,  but  these  scarcely  count  in  any  explanation 
of  his  heredity.  What  is  to  the  point  is  that  he  was 
the  son  of  a  man  whom  he  described  as  "  an  entirely 
honest  merchant,"  when  he  came  to  write  his  epitaph, 
and  the  grandson  of  a  woman  of  extraordinary  force 
of  character.  Ruskin  sprang  of  commercial  ancestry 
on  the  father's  side,  and  of  seafaring  people  on  the 
mother's.  That  he  came  of  the  commercial  classes  he 
tells  us  with  a  conscious  candour  worthy  of  Evan 
Harrington.  Harringtonesque,  too,  are  his  reminis- 
cences of  an  aunt  who  kept  a  baker's  shop  in  Croydon. 
The  confession  is  made  with  just  that  little  excess  of 
geniality  which  betrays  effort.  With  equal  candour, 
in  the  same  book,  he  avows  himself  all  for  aristocracy, 
though  in  no  sense  an  aristocrat.  No  more  need  be 
said.  Let  this  glimpse  of  an  amiable  foible  suffice. 

Ruskin' s  grandfather  was  an  Edinburgh  wine-mer- 
chant of  good  position,  afterwards  lost  by  imprudence. 
His  father,  John  James  Ruskin,  was  educated  at  the 
High  School  of  Edinburgh,  under  the  famous  Dr. 
Adam.  He  received  that  excellent  sound  old  classical 


PARENTAGE  AND  CHILDHOOD  5 

training  which  in  those  days  of  no  specialisation  fitted 
a  boy  alike  for  the  university  or  for  business.  Had 
his  father  continued  prosperous,  J.  J.  Ruskin  would 
doubtless  in  due  time  have  become  an  Edinburgh 
student,  for  he  showed  a  strong  bent  for  Latin  and 
philosophy ;  but  the  family  affairs  had  gone  wrong,  or 
were  going  wrong,  and  young  John  James  went  into 
business.  It  was  fortunate  that  he  did  so,  for  his 
commercial  success  enabled  him  to  surround  his  son 
with  those  affluent  influences  which  suffered  his  genius 
to  develop  along  its  own  lines.  A  place  was  found  for 
the  elder  Ruskin  in  a  wine-merchant's  office  in  London. 
There  he  spent  two  years,  and  in  1809  he  entered  into 
partnership  with  a  Mr.  Telford,  a  wealthy  squire  of 
Kent,  and  a  M.  Domecq,  a  great  grower  of  sherry. 
Telford,  as  Mr.  Collingwood  notes,  contributed  the 
capital,  Domecq  the  sherry,  and  Ruskin  the  brains. 

For  nine  years,  taking  no  holidays  that  were  not 
business  journeys,  J.  J.  Ruskin  exercised  those  brains 
in  putting  his  firm  on  a  sound  basis.  His  sensitive 
honour  had  made  him  resolve  to  pay  off  all  his  father's 
debts  before  he  would  lay  by  a  penny  for  himself. 
When  that  was  accomplished,  he  went  north  to  claim 
the  girl  who  had  been  his  betrothed  during  all  the  years 
of  his  servitude.  Margaret  Cox  was  his  cousin,  the 
daughter  of  a  Yarmouth  skipper.  For  a  long  time  she 
had  lived  with  J.  J.  Ruskin's  mother  in  Edinburgh, 
whither  she  had  gone  on  the  marriage  of  his  sister. 
Her  own  mother,  the  skipper's  widow,  kept  the  old 
King's  Head  Inn  in  Croydon  Market-place,  and  had 


6  JOHN    RUSKIN 

done  her  best  for  her  daughter's  education.  Even 
when  J.  J.  Ruskin  declared  himself  in  a  position  to 
marry,  Margaret  would  have  delayed ;  but  one  evening 
he  persuaded  her  to  get  married  at  once  in  the  Scotch 
fashion,  and  next  morning  the  pair  left  for  London. 
On  this  happy  despatch  hung  great  issues. 

Memory  awoke  early  for  the  child  John  Ruskin  in 
his  first  home,  that  Hunter  Street  house  where  he 
began  to  construct  the  world  for  himself.  His  picture 
of  his  childhood  is  that  of  a  solitary,  somewhat  over- 
disciplined  little  boy,  who  was  always  summarily 
whipped  if  he  cried,  did  not  do  as  he  was  bid,  or 
tumbled  on  the  stairs.  He  had  few  possessions,  and 
was  taught  abnegation  early,  never  being  permitted  for 
one  instant  to  hope  for  the  possession  of  such  things 
as  one  saw  in  toy -shops.  A  bunch  of  keys  in  early 
infancy,  a  cart  and  a  ball  when  he  was  older,  two 
boxes  of  well-cut  bricks  when  he  was  five  or  six,  were 
his  "entirely  sufficient  possessions."  Almost  as  soon 
as  he  could  remember,  he  had  learned  to  cultivate  the 
pleasures  of  the  imagination. 

"  I  would  pass  my  days  contentedly  in  tracing  the 
squares  and  colours  of  the  carpet,  examining  the  knots 
in  the  wood  of  the  floor,  or  counting  the  bricks  in  the 
opposite  houses ;  with  rapturous  intervals  of  excite- 
ment during  the  filling  of  the  water-cart  through  its 
leathern  pipe  from  the  dripping  iron  post  at  the  pave- 
ment edge,  or  the  still  more  admirable  proceedings  of 
the  turncock,  when  he  turned  and  turned  until  a 
fountain  sprang  up  in  the  middle  of  the  street." 


PARENTAGE  AND  CHILDHOOD   7 

The  sense  of  form,  however,  was  his  chief  resource, 
and  he  sought  patterns  in  the  carpet,  in  bed-covers, 
dresses,  and  wall-papers.  The  critic  awoke  in  the  con- 
templation of  the  carpet,  arid  when  he  was  only  three 
and  a  half  he  asked  Mr.  Northcote,  the  Royal  Acade- 
mician, to  whom  he  was  sitting  for  his  portrait,  why 
there  were  holes  in  his  carpet.  But  the  sense  of  colour 
was  awake  also,  for  when  the  artist  asked  the  child 
what  he  would  like  for  a  background,  he  replied  at 
once,  "  Blue  hills,"  thus  presaging  not  only  the  future 
master  of  colour,  but  the  passionate  lover  of  moun- 
tains, alike  in  their  picturesque  and  their  scientific 
significance.  He  was  rewarded  by  the  introduction 
of  two  rounded  hills  "  as  blue  as  his  shoes." 

Already  the  little  Ruskin's  horizon  had  stretched 
beyond  a  Bloomsbury  street.  Holidays  spent  with  the 
Croydon  relations  had  given  him  his  first  impressions 
of  a  South  London  still  rural  and  beautiful,  that  was 
soon  to  be  his  home  for  many  years  to  come.  There 
were  walks  on  Duppas  Hill  and  on  the  heather  at 
Addington,  and  sometimes  the  family  took  lodgings 
with  a  Mrs.  Ridley  at  Dulwich,  in  a  house  that  was 
"  the  last  of  a  row  in  a  lane  which  led  out  into  the 
Dulwich  fields  on  one  side,  and  was  itself  full  of 
buttercups  in  spring  and  of  blackberries  in  autumn." 
He  knew  Hampstead  also,  where  they  lived  in  "  real 
cottages,  not  villas  so  called."  Of  his  moral  train- 
ing at  this  remote  period  he  remembered  chiefly  his 
mother's  steady  watchfulness  to  guard  him  from  all 
pain  and  danger;  her  willingness  to  let  him  amuse 


8  JOHN    RUSKIN 

himself  as  he  liked,  provided  he  was  neither  fretful  nor 
troublesome.  Her  rigour  was  seen  in  her  restriction  of 
toys  of  which  she  disapproved.  A  "  most  radiant 
Punch  and  Judy,"  the  gift  of  his  less  austere  aunt, 
was  accepted,  but  afterwards  removed,  with  an  intima- 
tion that  it  was  not  good  for  him  to  have  them.  They 
were  never  seen  again.  How  strange,  yet  in  a  way 
how  salutary,  is  this  to  an  age  that  has  accepted  the 
Golliwog  and  the  Billikin,  the  former  innocent  and 
pleasing  enough,  but  the  latter  anathema ! 

But  these  were  insignificant  travels:  for  the  child 
in  his  fourth  summer  had  seen  and  learned  to  love 
Scotland.  His  father's  sister  Jessie  was  married  to  a 
Mr.  Richardson  in  Perth,  and  in  his  aunt's  house  at 
Bridge  End  beside  the  Tay,  towards  which  the  garden 
ran  sloping  steeply,  the  infant  John  Ruskin  found  new 
impressions,  to  be  strengthened  during  later  visits,  and 
to  be  perfectly  described  in  after-days  in  the  pages 
of  Prceterita,  that  autobiography  "written  frankly, 
garrulously,  and  at  ease." 

"  I  would  not  change  the  dreams,  far  less  the  tender 
realities,  of  those  early  days,  for  anything  I  hear  now 
remembered  by  lords  and  dames  of  their  days  of  child- 
hood in  castle  halls,  and  by  sweet  lawns  and  lakes  in 
park- walled  forest. 

"  Lawn  and  lake  enough  indeed  I  had,  in  the  North 
Inch  of  Perth,  and  pools  of  pausing  Tay,  before  Rose 
Terrace  (where  I  used  to  live  after  my  uncle  died, 
briefly  apoplectic,  at  Bridge  End),  in  the  peace  of  the 
fair  Scotch  summer  days." 


PARENTAGE  AND  CHILDHOOD  9 

On  this  head  one  more  passage  must  be  quoted, 
for  the  light  it  throws  on  the  mind  of  the  child, 
thus  early  susceptible  to  the  influence  of  the  "  spirit 
of  place  "  : — 

"  I  passed  my  days  much  as  the  thistles  and  the  tansy 
did,  only  with  perpetual  watching  of  all  the  ways  of 
running  water, — a  singular  awe  developing  itself  in  me, 
both  of  the  pools  of  Tay,  where  the  water  changed  from 
brown  to  blue-black,  and  of  the  precipices  of  Kinnoul ; 
partly  out  of  my  own  mind,  and  partly  because  the 
servants  always  became  serious  when  we  went  up 
Kinnoul  way,  especially  if  I  wanted  to  stay  and  look 
at  the  little  crystal  spring  of  Bower's  Well." 

Thus,  like  the  gods  in  the  Euripidean  chorus, 

"  Ever  delicately  marching 
Through  the  most  pellucid  air," 

the  soul  of  John  Ruskin  began  its  pilgrimage  through 
a  world  to  which  he  was  to  bring  great  and  high  teach- 
ing, at  much  cost  to  his  own  peace.  But  long,  tranquil 
days  of  preparation  were  still  before  him,  amid  fairer 
surroundings  than  the  fascinating  bricks  of  Hunter 
Street. 

In  1823,  the  year  after  the  painting  of  the  North- 
cote  portrait,  John  Ruskin  the  elder  had  so  far 
prospered  in  his  business  as  to  be  able  to  think  of  a 
home  in  a  pleasanter  quarter.  The  family  removed  to 
a  house  with  an  ample  garden  on  Herne  Hill,  after- 
wards known  as  No.  28.  It  was  one  of  a  group  of  four, 


10  JOHN    RUSKIN 

the  highest  blocks  of  buildings  on  the  crest  of  the  ridge, 
three-storied  with  garrets,  commanding  a  remarkable 
view  towards  Windsor  and  Harrow.  The  garden  was 
rich  in  fruit-trees,  forbidden  to  the  child,  but  afterwards 
to  bear  a  rich  literary  fruit  for  him  and  for  the  world, 
in  the  principles  laid  down  in  "  Proserpina,"  and  even 
then  early  realised,  that  the  seeds  and  fruit  of  them 
were  for  the  sake  of  the  flowers,  and  not  the  flowers 
for  the  fruit. 

In  that  pleasant  garden  the  boy  spent  most  of  his 
summer  days  ;  surely  the  weather  must  have  been  kinder 
then  ?  Lessons  had  already  begun,  and  as  soon  as  he 
could  read  fluently  his  mother  began  a  course  of  sys- 
tematic instruction  which  nothing  was  allowed  to 
interrupt.  After  his  father  had  gone  to  town  by  coach, 
John  was  sent  to  his  daily  task,  which  he  was  expected 
to  know  by  twelve  o'clock.  The  text-book  was  the 
Bible,  and  a  passage  had  to  be  learnt  by  heart.  Again 
and  again  mother  and  son  read  the  Scriptures  from 
beginning  to  end,  with  minute  attention  to  pronuncia- 
tion and  accent,  until  the  lightest  inflexion  was  per- 
fect. This  discipline,  ended  only  when  Ruskin  went  to 
Oxford,  he  counted  the  essential  portion  of  his  educa- 
tion. With  the  formidable  chapters,  strictly  learnt  by 
heart,  his  mother,  as  he  himself  says,  "  established  his 
soul  in  life."  Peace  lay  about  him,  in  those  days,  and 
he  learnt  obedience  and  faith,  also  that  habit  of  fixed 
attention  with  eyes  and  mind  which  long  afterwards 
caused  Mazzini  to  say  that  Ruskin  had  the  most 
analytic  mind  in  Europe. 


He  notes,  however,  the  defects  of  the  method — 
"  calamities,"  he  calls  them.  Withal  he  had  nothing 
to  love,  nothing  to  endure,  no  training  in  precision  of 
etiquette  and  manners.  The  last  cost  him  a  quaint 
disquiet,  humorously  confessed  in  his  account  of  his 
first  love  affair,  and  the  serio-comic  Disraeli  episode  at 
Christ  Church. 

The  evenings  at  Herne  Hill  were  no  less  remark- 
able than  the  mornings.  Mr.  Ruskin  came  home  early, 
and  while  he  dined  his  wife  heard  from  him  the  events 
of  the  day.  From  these  counsels  the  son  was  rigidly 
excluded,  but  in  summer  he  joined  his  parents  at  tea- 
time  in  the  garden,  where  the  rest  of  the  evening  was 
spent.  In  winter  or  rough  weather  he  had  his  bread 
and  milk  in  the  drawing-room,  in  a  little  recess,  where 
he  remained,  like  an  idol  in  its  niche,  until  bedtime, 
listening  while  his  father  read  Scott  or  Byron.  Before 
him  was  a  small  table,  at  which  as  he  grew  older  he 
practised  a  marvellous  literature.  The  Muses  had 
caught  him.  He  toiled  at  a  conclusion  of  Miss  Edge- 
worth's  "  Harry  and  Lucy,"  with  copper-plates — 
"  written  by  a  little  boy  and  drawn,"  is  the  artless 
legend  of  the  title-page.  His  father's  taste  and  skill  in 
water-colour  had  roused  him  to  emulation.  But  he 
aspired  even  higher.  This  child  of  seven,  whom  his 
mother  had  fondly  dedicated  to  the  Church,  had 
already  recognised  a  vocation.  John  Ruskin  was  to 
be  a  poet. 

The  growth  of  his  little  lyric  gift,  and  its  renuncia- 
tion for  the  highest  achievement  in  modern  English 


12  JOHN    RUSKIN 

prose,  lead  us  far  away  from  Ruskin's  childish  days. 
But  it  remained  the  leading  motive  of  his  life  until  he 
stood  upon  the  threshold  of  manhood.  Let  us  follow 
him  thither  through  that  growing  boyhood,  upon  which 
the  shades  of  the  prison-house  seemed  reluctant  to 
close. 


CHAPTER   II 

HERNE   HILL   AND   EXCURSIONS 

THE  great  event  of  the  year  for  John  Ruskin  was 
his  father's  birthday,  the  10th  of  May.  For  that 
occasion  the  small  poet  always  produced  a  copy  of 
verses,  the  subject  of  much  anxious  thought  during 
the  preceding  weeks.  But  besides  these  special  efforts 
he  was  continually  busy  with  composition,  which  his 
parents  encouraged.  They  made  it,  indeed,  the  means 
of  earning  pocket-money,  a  custom  of  doubtful  wisdom. 
But  the  money  at  any  rate  was  earned,  for  the  child 
did  not  spare  himself. 

Nor  were  his  labours  wholly  in  the  field  of  art. 
His  passion  for  physical  science  had  declared  itself 
in  his  fondness  for  minerals,  and  on  that  theme 
he  wrote  learnedly.  As  for  the  reward — "  Homer " 
fetched  a  shilling  a  page ;  "  Composition,"  a  penny 
for  twenty  lines ;  "  Mineralogy,"  a  penny  for  each 
article.  His  verses  are  wonderful  for  a  mere  child, 
but  like  the  rest  of  Ruskin's  poetry,  even  the  maturer 
examples,  they  are  little  more  than  literary  curiosities 
to-day.  He  imitated  Scott,  Byron,  and  Young  with 
a  quaint  infusion  of  his  own  small  observation  and 
experience.  The  close  transcript  of  the  thing  seen  is 

13 


14  JOHN    RUSKIN 

perhaps  the  most  valuable  sidelight  the  poems  afford 
upon  the  mind  of  the  author-to-be. 

But  the  10th  of  May  had  another  significance. 
It  marked  the  departure  of  the  Ruskin  family  upon 
their  annual  tour  through  England.  Their  way  fre- 
quently extended  as  far  as  Scotland.  These  leisurely 
journeys,  made  in  a  roomy  post-chaise,  fitted  with 
all  sorts  of  fascinating  convenient  devices,  were  under- 
taken as  much  for  business  as  for  pleasure,  and  in 
their  course  Mr.  Ruskin  called  upon  his  chief  country 
customers,  always  bearing  away  a  substantial  sheaf 
of  commissions.  This  remarkable  wine-merchant  was 
welcomed  everywhere  for  his  personality,  like  the  great 
Mel  Harrington ;  but,  unlike  Melchisedec,  he  knew  how 
to  turn  his  popularity  to  sound  commercial  advantage. 

To  little  John  these  travels  were  another  education 
and  an  inspiration.  He  learned  to  know  the  countries 
of  his  birth  and  of  his  descent,  and  he  reproduced  his 
impressions  in  a  continual  stream  of  literary  works. 
He  kept  journals,  he  composed  itineraries,  he  cele- 
brated the  things  he  had  seen  in  various  verse. 
Perched  on  a  little  cushioned  seat  in  front  of  his  parents, 
he  delighted  in  the  wide  unfolding  view  from  the 
chaise  windows,  and  caught  by  the  equestrian  spirit, 
he  imitated  the  postilion,  in  mile-long  imaginative 
gallops.  To  add  to  the  realism  of  this  pastime,  patient 
Papa  Ruskin  allowed  his  own  devoted  legs  to  be 
whipped,  "in  a  quite  practical  and  efficient  manner," 
with  a  silver-mounted  riding-whip  he  had  himself 
given  to  the  boy. 


HERNE    HILL— EXCURSIONS      15 

The  chronology  of  these  early  journeys  is  important. 
The  first  visit  to  Scotland  was  made  by  sea  in  1822. 
In  1823  the  summer  tour  lay  through  the  south- 
west of  England.  In  1824  they  went  to  the  Lakes, 
Keswick,  and  Perth.  In  1825  John  made  his  first 
acquaintance  with  the  Continent,  and  saw  Paris, 
Brussels,  and  Waterloo,  which  last  he  afterwards  sang 
in  a  dramatic  poem.  He  was  present  during  this 
tour  at  the  coronation  festivities  of  Charles  X.  In 
1826,  the  year  of  his  first  poem,  "The  Needless 
Alarm,"  they  were  again  at  the  Lakes  and  Perth. 
His  first  memory  of  life,  he  says,  "  meaning  of  things 
chiefly  precious  to  me  afterwards,"  was  of  Friar's 
Crag  on  Derwentwater,  now  marked  by  his  monu- 
ment. The  limiting  phrase  is  significant ;  for  he 
had  earlier  memories,  and  it  marks  that  passion  for 
the  hills,  and  above  all  his  affection  for  that  Coniston 
region,  where  he  was  at  length  to  see  an  end  of  his 
labours.  At  the  Coniston  Inn,  in  those  early  days, 
he  and  his  mother  stayed,  while  his  father  went  on 
his  business  journeys  to  Whitehaven,  Lancaster,  New- 
castle, and  other  northern  towns.  Thus  at  large  leisure, 
and  under  intelligent  guidance,  John  Ruskin's  appren- 
ticeship went  forward.  Through  an  unspoiled  England 
he  came  by  easy  stages  to  his  life-work. 

The  year  1826  not  only  saw  the  dawn  of  poetry, 
but  marked  an  epoch  in  Ruskin's  formal  education. 
It  was  now  time  to  begin  Latin.  To  that  task  Mrs. 
Ruskin  was  quite  equal,  and,  with  the  same  thorough- 
ness that  she  brought  to  other  lessons,  she  put  her 


16  JOHN    RUSKIN 

son  through  the  Grammar  of  Dr.  Adam,  using  the 
very  book  that  her  husband  had  carried  in  his  satchel 
to  the  High  School  of  Edinburgh. 

The  summer  of  1827  found  the  Ruskins  again  at 
Perth;  next  year  they  went  to  the  west  of  England, 
and  about  that  time  the  poet  projected  a  great  work, 
"Eudosia,  a  Poem  on  the  Universe."  In  that  year, 
too,  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Ruskin  adopted  John's  Perth  cousin, 
Mary  Richardson,  who  was  brought  up  as  a  sister  to 
the  boy.  There  was  no  extended  tour  in  1829,  only 
a  little  sojourn  in  Kent.  In  the  autumn  of  1830 
Ruskin  was  at  length  considered  to  have  outgrown 
his  mother's  tutorship. 

At  that  time  there  ministered  in  Beresford  Chapel, 
Walworth,  an  excellent  divine,  whose  oracles  Mrs. 
Ruskin  attended,  accompanied,  "contentedly  or  at 
least  submissively "  (says  Ruskin  in  Prceterita),  by 
her  husband.  Dr.  Andrews,  who  was  the  father  of 
the  first  Mrs.  Coventry  Patmore,  "  had  the  reputa- 
tion (in  Walworth)  of  being  a  good  scholar,"  so  to 
him  John  was  sent  to  learn  Greek,  already  too  long 
delayed.  It  appears  that  Dr.  Andrews 

"  in  Greek 
Was  sadly  to  seek," 

his  method  was  peculiar,  not  to  say  fearful  and  wonder- 
ful, but  he  accomplished  one  thing  in  which  a  more 
accurate  scholar  might  have  failed — he  interested  his 
pupil,  who  ever  retained  a  wistful  affection  for  Hel- 
lenic studies,  although  he  was  the  first  to  confess  his 


HEJRNE    HILL— EXCURSIONS      17 

lamentable  deficiency  in  grasp  of  the  language.  In 
the  sketch  of  his  Oxford  career,  it  will  be  seen  how 
he  suffered  from  the  lack  of  proper  training.  Perhaps 
it  did  not  matter  much :  the  enemies  of  classical 
teaching  will  say  that  it  was  better  so ;  but  they  mis- 
conceive, for  Ruskin  would  have  been  infinitely  helped 
by  a  thorough  mastery  of  Greek,  and  it  was  impossible 
for  him  ever  to  have  sunk  into  a  mere  pedant. 

With  Dr.  Andrews  he  went  on  with  his  Latin, 
reading  Virgil,  and  taking  pleasure  in  his  tutor's  odd 
illustrations;  in  Greek  he  read  Anacreon,  before  he 
knew  his  verbs,  and  of  course  he  fell  at  once  to  verse 
translation.  It  was  a  happy-go-lucky,  genial  scramble 
up  Parnassus,  with  more  waggery  afoot  than  sound 
learning  on  both  sides ;  but  the  boy  was  delighted,  and 
looked  forward  eagerly  to  the  three  days  a  week  on 
which  he  worked  with  his  desultory  master.  Some 
suspicion  of  the  method  entered  Mrs.  Ruskin's  shrewd 
brain,  but  she  could  not  be  expected  to  put  her  finger 
on  the  place.  She  thought,  however,  that  Dr.  Andrews 
was  "  flighty,"  when,  after  six  months,  he  proposed  that 
John  should  begin  Hebrew !  Of  Semitic  studies  we 
hear  no  more. 

All  this  time  Ruskin's  interest  in  Art  was  steadily 
increasing.  He  tried  to  copy  Cruikshank's  illustrations 
to  Grimm's  Fairy  Tales,  his  first  serious  beginnings  in 
drawing.  The  "  singular  genius  of  Cruikshank  "  and  his 
pictures,  "perhaps  the  finest  line- work  since  Rembrandt's 
etchings,"  he  was  always  to  hold  in  reverence,  and  he 
would  have  all  beginners  make  this  their  first  model. 

B 


18  JOHN    RUSKIN 

Ruskin's  work  showed  so  much  promise  that  his 
father  now  sent  him  to  take  drawing-lessons  from 
Mr.  Runciman,  with  whom  he  remained  for  several 
years.  Runciman  was  a  severe  and  somewhat  opinion- 
ative  taskmaster,  but  once  at  least  he  bowed  to  his 
pupil's  independence,  and  actually  modified  his  method, 
allowing  him  to  use  colour  earlier  than  he  would  have 
done  in  the  case  of  a  pupil  less  extraordinary.  In  the 
same  year,  1831,  a  mathematical  master  was  engaged, 
and  with  him  Ruskin  got  a  firm  hold  of  the  elements 
of  geometry,  a  subject  which  he  really  liked  and  in 
which  he  attempted  a  little  original  work  of  a  romantic 
kind — the  baffling  tri-section  of  an  angle. 

But  a  greater  influence  was  now  at  hand :  the  boy 
was  to  encounter  a  force  in  art  that  was  afterwards 
to  make  his  own  career,  and  to  rescue  from  obloquy 
and  misunderstanding  a  once  popular  genius,  who, 
reaching  after  a  new  expression  of  truth,  had  put 
himself  of  necessity  out  of  favour  with  his  country- 
men. Ruskin's  fourteenth  birthday  brought  him  a 
gift  which  was  a  revelation.  His  father's  partner 
Mr.  Telford  sent  him  Rogers'  "  Italy."  Perhaps  the 
giver  thought  only  of  the  poetry  in  making  his  choice, 
but  Ruskin  thought  less  of  that  than  of  the  wonderful 
illustrations,  those  vignettes  by  a  marvellous  man 
Turner,  who  saw  mountains  as  the  boy  saw  them, 
but  with  the  eyes  of  a  life's  experience.  Ruskin's 
soul  went  out  with  a  rush  to  this  new  master,  in 
whom  he  found  what  he  had  been  seeking  ever  since 
his  precocious  mind  had  begun  to  grope  after  the 


HERNE    HILL— EXCURSIONS      19 

artistic  concept.  He  set  himself  to  copy  the  "  Alps 
at  Daybreak,"  and  from  that  moment  there  was  for 
him  no  turning  back. 

Travel  again  came  to  the  aid  of  this  fortunate 
prince.  That  very  year  he  saw  the  Alps  of  his 
dreams — not,  however,  because  of  the  Turner  book, 
as  one  might  suppose.  The  son's  enthusiasm  for 
the  peaks  and  the  great  silences  found  only  a  qualified 
echo  in  the  father  ;  but  by  a  happy  chance  Mr.  Ruskin 
had  just  bought  Prout's  "  Sketches  in  Flanders  and 
Germany,"  and  being  interested  in  Gothic,  he  readily 
fell  in  with  his  wife's  suggestion  that  they  should 
all  go  to  see  these  places  for  themselves.  In  May 
1833  they  set  out,  and  John  Ruskin  entered  upon  a 
new  phase  of  his  mental  and  moral  development. 

By  way  of  "  customary  Calais  "  the  Ruskins  began 
their  posting  journey  through  Flanders  and  Germany. 
The  boy  noted  in  after-years  that  he  was  already  wise 
enough  to  feel  Strasburg  Cathedral  stiff  and  iron-worky, 
but  the  richness  of  the  wooden  houses  impressed  and 
excited  him  because  of  their  promise  of  nearness  to 
Switzerland.  "  The  Nature  of  Gothic "  was  not  yet 
even  dimly  perceived,  otherwise  the  houses  would  have 
suggested  more  than  Switzerland.  That  land  of  his 
desire  was  approached  strategically  after  family  council 
with  Salvador,  their  courier.  Should  it  be  Basle  or 
Schaffhausen  ?  At  Basle  there  were  no  Alps  in  sight. 
To  Schaffhausen,  then,  be  it ;  and  so,  on  a  memorable 
Sunday  evening,  "  suddenly — behold — beyond  1 " 

A   lifetime    later    he    paused,    with    remembered 


20  JOHN    RUSKIN 

emotion,  on  these  exclamatory  words,  and  left  his 
great  paragraph  incomplete.  Artist  that  he  was,  he 
could  not  write  the  name  of  the  sacred  rampart  of 
Europe,  but  there  was  no  need  to  tell  his  readers  what 
he  had  seen.  He  resumes  : — 

"  There  was  no  thought  in  any  of  us  for  a  moment 
of  their  being  clouds.  They  were  clear  as  crystal,  sharp 
on  the  pure  horizon  sky,  and  already  tinged  with  rose 
by  the  sinking  sun.  Infinitely  beyond  all  that  we  had 
ever  thought  or  dreamed, — the  seen  walls  of  lost  Eden 
could  not  have  been  more  beautiful  to  us ;  not  more 
awful,  round  heaven,  the  walls  of  sacred  Death." 

For  the  rest  of  that  journey  he  moved  in  an  en- 
chanted land,  with  Turner  for  his  guide.  They  crossed 
the  Splugen  and  went  down  into  Italy,  seeing  Milan, 
the  Lakes,  and  the  Mediterranean  at  Genoa.  Then 
they  came  back  through  the  Oberland  to  Chamouni, 
the  scene  in  after-days  of  many  labours.  Already  he 
had  a  new  great  work  on  hand — he  would  make  an 
Italy  of  his  own  after  the  manner  of  Mr.  Rogers,  and 
be  his  own  illustrator,  after  the  manner  of  Turner.  He 
set  himself  to  imitate  the  delicate  vignettes,  and  as 
he  wrought  came  to  a  surer  dexterity  of  hand,  to  be 
further  confirmed  in  the  next  year's  tour.  The  route 
of  that  second  journey  is  recorded  in  his  sketches : 
Chamouni,  St.  Bernard,  Aosta,  the  Oberland  once 
more,  St.  Gothard,  Lucerne,  by  the  Stelvio  to  Venice 
and  Verona,  and  home  through  the  Tyrol  and  Ger- 
many. But  his  study  of  the  Alps  was  not  alone 


.<£ 


V. 


HERNE    HILL— EXCURSIONS      21 

artistic.  The  young  man  of  science  was  also  busy  with 
a  geological  inquiry,  helped  by  Saussure's  Voyages 
dans  les  Alpes,  a  birthday  gift  from  his  father  in  1834. 
The  mountains,  he  had  seen,  held  physical  secrets  as 
well  as  possibilities  of  picture-making,  and  these  he  set 
himself  to  discover. 

In  the  interval  between  the  first  and  second  Alpine 
journeys,  John  Ruskin  was  sent  to  school  as  a  day-boy 
with  the  Rev.  Thomas  Dale  in  Grove  Lane,  Peckham. 
The  mere  place  of  his  new  Academe  had  not  then  the 
odd  associations  it  bears  for  us  to-day,  although  it  is  at 
least  quaint  that  he  should  have  passed,  with  a  brief 
interlude  of  study  at  King's  College,  London,  straight 
from  Peckham  to  Christ  Church.  It  was  now  recog- 
nised that  Dr.  Andrews  would  never  prepare  him  for 
college  and  the  Church,  in  which  the  elder  Ruskins 
hoped  in  due  time  to  see  their  genius  advancing  towards 
lawn  sleeves.  But  while  he  made  some  better  progress 
in  mere  school- work  with  Mr.  Dale,  Ruskin  had  other 
occupations  that  were  leading  him  surely  away  from 
Holy  Orders. 

The  year  1834  had  seen  his  first  appearance  in  print 
with  his  "  Enquiries  on  the  Causes  of  the  Colour  of 
the  Water  of  the  Rhine,"  and  another  essay,  "  Facts 
and  Considerations  of  the  Strata  of  Mont  Blanc,"  both 
published  in  London's  Magazine  of  Natural  History. 
Nor  was  Poetry  neglected.  Through  his  cousin  Charles, 
a  clerk  in  Messrs.  Smith,  Elder's,  he  had  been  introduced 
to  Mr.  Pringle,  the  Editor  of  that  sumptuous  boudoir 
annual  Friendship's  Offering.  Mr.  Pringle  encour- 


22  JOHN    RUSKIN 

aged  Ruskin's  verse-making,  and  even  took  the  boy  to 
see  Samuel  Rogers.  At  that  interview  Ruskin  knew 
not  how  to  play  the  courtier ;  his  talk  to  the  poet  of 
"  Italy  "  was  all  of  Mr.  Turner's  drawings,  about  which 
Rogers  showed  little  enthusiasm,  and  no  progress  was 
made  in  that  direction.  Mr.  Pringle  even  administered 
a  mild  rebuke  on  the  way  back  to  Herne  Hill.  But 
Friendship's  Offering  for  1835  contained  three  poems 
— "  Andernach,"  "  St.  Goar,"  and  "  Salzburg  "—all  by 
John  Ruskin,  and  they  wrere  illustrated  with  a  beauti- 
ful plate  engraved  by  Goodall  after  Purser,  somewhat  in 
the  Turner  manner.  So  the  bard  felt  he  might  hold 
a  candle  to  Mr.  Rogers  after  all.  This  was  all  very 
giddy  and  exciting,  no  doubt,  but  greater  joy  was  in 
store,  dashed,  however,  by  a  miscarriage  of  publication. 
No  matter,  he  had  entered  the  lists  and  broken  his  first 
lance  for  his  hero.  Blackwootfs  criticism  of  Turner's 
Academy  pictures  for  1836  roused  the  young  man  to 
reply.  Mr.  Ruskin  enclosed  the  MS.  to  the  artist, 
asking  permission  to  send  it  to  "  Maga  " ;  but  Turner, 
while  obliged,  was  contemptuous  of  attacks,  desired  no 
reply,  and  sent  the  MS.  to  Mr.  Munro  of  Novar,  who 
had  bought  the  censured  picture.  This  article,  the 
germ  of  "  Modern  Painters,"  was  therefore  lost.  Dis- 
covered long  afterwards  in  a  duplicate  copy,  it  shows 
Turner's  champion  firm  in  his  saddle — firmer,  indeed, 
than  he  ever  was  on  the  back  of  that  early  pony  from 
which  he  rolled  so  persistently  into  the  mud  of  Nor- 
wood lanes. 

With  these  occupations  and  excitements,  tempered 


HEKNE    HILL— EXCURSIONS     23 

by  painting  lessons  from  Copley  Fielding  and  by  the 
wholesome  fear  of  the  Oxford  matriculation  examina- 
tion, now  looming  in  sight,  Ruskin  passed  the  year 
1836.  In  October  he  matriculated,  and  the  following 
January  saw  him  go  into  residence.  Like  everything 
else  in  his  career,  his  entry  into  Oxford  was  unique, 
a  thing  apart  and  purely  Ruskinesque,  unparalleled 
perhaps  in  the  history  of  the  University.  At  that 
amiable  comedy  we  are  now  to  assist. 


CHAPTER  III 

OXFORD 

EVER  desirous  to  do  the  best  for  his  son,  Mr.  J.  J. 
Ruskin  realised  the  serious  importance  of  entering 
him  at  a  college  that  offered  the  highest  social  and 
educational  advantages.  His  choice  fell  upon  Christ 
Church,  where  the  society  was  certainly  unexception- 
able in  point  of  rank,  and  where  scholarship  was 
represented  by  its  Dean,  the  mighty  Grecian  Gaisford, 
unpolished  in  manner  but  withal  terribly  learned. 

To  Gaisford  Mr.  Ruskin  went  in  the  early  part 
of  the  year  1836,  to  arrange  for  John's  matriculation. 
The  son,  writing  of  the  interview  long  afterwards,  is 
quietly  alive  to  its  humour.  Blunt  Dean  and  earnest 
paterfamilias  must  have  made  an  odd  contrast  as 
they  discussed  what  status  John  should  occupy  in 
college.  Mr.  Ruskin  learned  that  there  was  a  finer 
flower  of  undergraduate  known  as  the  Gentleman-Com- 
moner. Was  there  anything  to  hinder  his  son's  being 
enrolled  as  such  ?  It  was  merely  a  question  of  some 
rather  heavy  fees.  Money  mattered  not,  and  thus 
it  came  about  long  afterwards  that  Mr.  Tuckwell, 
writing  delightfully  of  that  far-off  Oxford  of  1837, 
mentions  among  the  men  of  note  "  Young  Gentleman- 
Commoner  Ruskin." 


BS^^s^ansP^S^^u^  IK^y- 


OXFORD  25 

It  was  an  Oxford  somewhat  hard  for  us  of  a 
later  generation  to  realise.  Tract  XC.  was  still  three 
years  ahead,  and  the  University  was  only  beginning 
to  arouse  herself  from  her  long  lethargy.  But  stirrings 
of  a  new  spirit  were  in  the  air,  and  at  Oriel  Newman 
was  fighting  his  great  spiritual  battle  that  would  at 
length  separate  him  from  his  Alma  Mater  and  from 
the  Church  of  his  fathers,  but  would  set  a  quickening 
seal  upon  the  place  he  had  left.  It  was  an  age  of 
remarkable  men — Stanley,  Matthew  Arnold,  Clough, 
Lord  Hobhouse,  Henry  Acland,  Jowett.  Gladstone 
had  but  recently  gone  down.  Of  the  greater  dons 
of  that  time,  Dr.  Routh,  who  had  actually  seen 
Dr.  Johnson,  still  held  the  Presidency  of  Magdalen 
and  kept  the  eighteenth  century  alive  in  dress  and 
manner,  but  he  appeared  rarely  in  the  streets  after 
1836.  Pusey,  more  or  less  a  hermit,  occupied  the 
Hebrew  Chair,  and  formed  the  subject  of  fantastic 
myths.  Buckland,  the  geologist,  with  his  surprising 
hat  and  bag,  was,  next  to  the  Dean,  the  chief 
"character"  of  Christ  Church,  then  rich  in  oddities. 
Newman,  taking  indispensable  exercise,  was  a  familiar 
figure  on  the  country  roads  any  afternoon. 

Undergraduate  life  had  less  diversity,  less  colour, 
than  it  carries  with  it  to-day.  Athletic  sports  were 
unknown,  football  unheard  of;  there  was  only  one 
cricket  field,  the  Magdalen  ground.  Boating  had  not 
become  a  passion ;  the  delicate,  lazy  delights  of  punt 
or  canoe  on  the  Cher  had  not  yet  been  discovered. 
The  hunt,  the  drag,  hurdle-jumping,  and  tandem-driving 


26  JOHN    RUSKIN 

amused  the  rich.  Men  drank  too  much,  and  on 
Sunday,  according  to  Mozley,  in  a  college  affection 
forbids  us  to  name,  they  drowned,  in  a  double  measure 
of  ale,  the  boredom  of  writing  out,  in  compulsory 
abstract,  the  morning's  sermon  at  St.  Mary's.  Costume 
was  stiff  and  formal :  academic  dress  strictly  en- 
forced. Frock  and  tail  coats  were  correct  in  hall ; 
the  beaver-hat  was  worn  on  the  way  to  the  boats 
or  the  cricket  field.  No  one  would  have  appeared  in 
flannels  on  the  High.  The  times  were  now  dull, 
now  riotous — as  ever,  since  St.  Scholastica's  day. 
Rowdyism  moves  in  cycles,  passing  from  college  to 
college  as  the  wind  blows.  At  the  time  when  John 
Ruskin  went  up,  Christ  Church  seems  to  have  been 
lively.  At  first  he  was  an  augmenting  cause. 

If  anything  was  needed  to  make  his  position  more 
difficult — and  difficult  it  was  enough,  owing  to  his 
early  education — it  was  the  extension  of  his  mother's 
care  even  to  the  gates  of  Christ  Church.  It  would 
not  be  fair  to  blame  her,  for  Ruskin  was  physically 
delicate,  and  needed  watching  over  in  an  especial 
degree.  But  it  might  have  been  well  to  have  spared 
him  the  burden  of  a  chaperone.  It  is  easy  to  imagine 
the  unholy  glee  of  his  contemporaries  when  it  became 
known  that  the  Gentleman-Commoner  from  a  Peck- 
ham  Academy  had  actually  been  accompanied  to 
college  by  his  "  Mamma,"  as  he  called  her.  Mrs. 
Ruskin  took  lodgings  in  High  Street,  and  her  son 
devoted  all  his  evenings  to  her,  until  Tom,  the  great 
bell  of  Christ  Church,  recalled  him  at  nine  o'clock 


OXFORD  27 

to  his  rooms  in  Peckwater  Quadrangle.  At  first  he 
had  to  put  up  with  the  usual  furious  invasions  of 
the  revel-rout  of  undergraduates,  but  he  lived  that 
down,  helped  no  doubt  by  the  diplomacy  that  led 
him  to  lay  in  a  bottle  or  two  of  papa's  best  wine. 
But  the  ungodly  broke  his  windows,  rode  on  his 
back  round  the  quadrangle,  and  made  his  reading 
of  an  essay  in  Hall  the  occasion  for  what  would  now 
be  called  a  "  rag,"  culminating  in  the  inevitable  bon- 
fire. His  theme,  alas  !  had  been  very  long  and  very 
fine.  He  had  transgressed  the  unwritten  law  that 
no  Gentleman- Commoner's  composition  should  exceed 
forty-eight  words  in  length.  He  had  behaved  like 
a  vulgar  reading-man,  and  he  was  taken  to  task  ac- 
cordingly. But  in  repartee  he  could  hold  his  own 
neatly  enough. 

There  used  to  be  an  undergraduate  tradition,  for 
which  there  is  no  hint  of  authority  in  Prceterita,  that 
Mrs.  Ruskin  did  not  intend  her  son  to  go  into  college 
at  all,  but  to  live  with  her  in  High  Street.  Christ 
Church  militant,  the  tradition  says,  broke  the  windows 
every  night  until  Ruskin  came  into  the  House.  But 
this  is  disposed  of  by  the  testimony  of  the  autobio- 
graphy. Ruskin  tells  us  that  his  first  night  in  residence 
was  spent  in  Peckwater.  The  madcap  ways  of  the 
noble  young  men  with  whom  her  son  was  thrown  were 
inexplicable,  if  flattering,  to  Mrs.  Ruskin.  "  It  does 
little  good  sporting  his  oak,"  she  writes,  adding  that 
Lord  Desart  and  Grimston  had  climbed  in  through 
the  window,  when  John  was  "  hard  at  work."  The 


28  JOHN    RUSKIN 

dear  lady  evidently  imagined  that  it  was  eagerness  for 
her  son's  society  that  prompted  this  feat. 

Brought  up  as  he  had  been,  Ruskin  was  at  once 
a  little  too  superior  and  not  superior  enough.  His 
intolerance  of  undergraduate  pranks  is  evident  from  one 
of  his  poems,  in  which  he  describes  contemptuously  the 
noise  of  a  distant  "  wine."  But  he  found  staunch  and 
good  friends  in  Acland  and  Liddell.  The  fame  of  his 
drawings  soon  brought  the  curious  to  his  rooms,  and 
Gaisford  sent  for  his  portfolio,  which  he  returned  with 
a  note  of  compliment. 

Wretchedly  prepared,  Ruskin  of  course  found  his 
mere  reading  a  tax,  and  he  had  to  work  out  of  all 
proportion  to  the  average  necessities  of  the  case.  In 
these  days  of  far  severer  schools,  the  Honours  man 
is  tempted  to  smile  at  the  elementary  studies  which 
cost  the  future  Professor  of  Fine  Art  so  much  toil. 
Luckily,  in  Osborne  Gordon  he  found  a  sympathetic 
tutor,  who  in  the  fulness  of  time  pulled  him  through. 
A  very  pleasant  part  of  his  Christ  Church  days  was 
his  friendship  with  Buckland,  who  pressed  his  artistic 
talent  into  the  service  of  the  geology  lecture.  Some 
of  Ruskin's  drawings  are  still  in  use  at  the  House. 
At  the  Bucklands'  he  met  Darwin,  and  recognised 
him  at  once  for  a  man  of  genius. 

To  win  the  Newdigate  Prize  for  English  Verse 
Ruskin  set  himself  with  infinite  labour  and  patience. 
Three  times  he  tried.  The  first  time  Stanley  beat 
him,  the  second  time  Dart ;  the  third  time  was  lucky, 
and  in  1839,  coached  by  Keble,  he  recited  his  "  Salsette 


OXFORD  29 

and  Elephanta"  in  the  Sheldonian  Theatre  at  Com- 
memoration. 

At  this  point,  however,  his  career  was  interrupted 
by  serious  illness,  due  to  a  disappointment.  Shortly 
before  he  went  up  to  Oxford,  he  had  fallen  wildly  in 
love  with  one  of  the  beautiful  daughters  of  his  father's 
partner,  Mr.  Domecq.  But  Adele  Clotilde  saw  nothing 
in  the  awkward  poetical  boy  of  Herne  Hill,  and  the 
union  eagerly  desired  by  the  parents  of  the  young  people 
could  not  be  arranged.  The  lady  made  another  match. 
During  his  first  two  years  at  Christ  Church,  Ruskin 
ate  his  heart  out  and  sang  his  sentimental  woes.  '  Then 
he  was  threatened  with  consumption,  and  was  carried 
from  health  resort  to  health  resort  for  two  years.  The 
news  of  Adele's  marriage  was  carefully  concealed  from 
him.  For  the  time  his  degree  stood  over,  and  sym- 
pathetic relatives  spoke  of  a  blighted  career,  of  honours 
lost,  and  with  them  all  hope  of  high  preferment  in  the 
Church.  Every  one  who  can  estimate  the  circum- 
stances aright  understands  that,  despite  the  Newdigate, 
John  Ruskin  was  not  on  the  high-road  to  academic 
distinction,  as  the  Schools  account  such. 

Fortunately  for  the  world,  he  recovered,  and  in 
1842  he  went  up  again  to  Oxford.  Taking  pass 
Schools,  he  was  awarded  a  ludicrous  distinction  then  in 
vogue — complimentary  honours,  "  an  Honorary  Double 
Fourth."  It  is  in  no  carping  spirit  that  we  are  at 
this  pains  to  place  Ruskin's  scholarship  at  its  proper 
level ;  it  only  makes  his  independent  achievement  the 
more  extraordinary  when  we  realise  how  meagrely 


30  JOHN    RUSKIN 

equipped  he  came  to  his  task.  Here  is  no  wail  that 
he  was  not  turned  out  a  finished  pedant,  but  one  does 
regret,  on  a  consideration  of  pure  economy,  that  he 
lacked  the  training  sufficient  to  save  him  from  the 
ever-lurking,  insidious  blunder,  source  of  much  sorrow, 
and  painful  waste  of  time  in  after-years. 

It  is  difficult  to  arrive  at  a  sure  knowledge  of  his 
feelings  towards  his  Alma  Mater.  His  reticences  hint 
at  a  life  not  wholly  at  ease  there.  The  Cathedral  stirs 
him,  but  there  is  no  passionate  affection  for  the  stones 
of  Oxford.  In  all  his  references  to  the  University 
there  is  not  one  passage  touched  with  the  spirit  of  the 
Scholar  Gypsy.  His  was  not  the  temper  that  would 
turn  to  watch  with  wistful  adoration — 

"  The  line  of  festal  light  in  Christ  Church  Hall." 

In  its  vast  spaces  he  confessed  himself  always  out  of 
place. 

Fiercely  ironical  (in  Fors  Clavigera],  he  reproaches 
Harrison  for  wasting  time  in  Magdalen  walks,  "old- 
fashioned  thirty  years  ago."  Why  did  he  not  seek  "  the 
rapturous  sanctities  of  Keble,"  the  lively  new  zigzag 
parapet  of  Tom  Quad,  or  "the  elongating  suburb  of 
the  married  Fellows  on  the  cock-horse  road  to  Ban- 
bury  "  ?  Perhaps  one  may  detect  some  enthusiasm  for 
the  groves  of  Magdalen  in  his  irony,  some  jealousy  for 
Christ  Church  in  the  protest  against  the  parapet  of 
Tom  Quad,  but  it  is  doubtful  whether  Wolsey's 
foundation  moved  him  as  it  has  moved  many.  The 
gaunt  outlines  of  Peckwater,  where  he  lodged,  looking 


OXFORD  31 

across  to  the  still  drearier  pile  of  the  library,  impressed 
him  at  first.  Later  he  takes  this  as  a  sign  of  crudity. 
But  he  cannot  at  any  time  have  loved  it.  And 
he  certainly  hated  the  "howling"  of  riotous  under- 
graduates. 

In  Arnold  and  Newman  the  spires  of  Oxford  and 
the  snapdragon  on  her  walls  awoke  a  romantic  longing 
that  is  scarcely  discoverable  in  Ruskin.  But  however 
deep  might  be  her  offence,  he  was  loyal  to  the  trust 
Oxford  had  given  him  and  loyal  to  the  idea  of  a 
University.  "  It  is,"  he  said  long  afterwards  to  his 
pupils,  "the  scholar's  duty  to  know  and  love  the  per- 
petual laws  of  classic  literature  and  art."  That  was 
the  reason  of  their  presence  at  the  University,  and 
he  warned  his  hearers  that  he  had  nothing  to  give 
them  that  they  could  sell.  "  If  you  come  to  get 
your  living  out  of  her,  you  are  ruining  both  Oxford 
and  yourselves." 

From  reticences  and  implications  rather  than  from 
overt  statements,  some  hint  may  be  caught  of  Ruskin's 
attitude  towards  his  University.  Of  his  return  thither, 
and  of  his  work  as  Professor,  something  will  be  said 
on  a  later  page.  We  have  now  brought  him  to  the 
year  1842,  in  which  he  took  his  B.A.  degree  and  was 
entitled  to  sign  himself  "A  Graduate  of  Oxford." 
That  modest  title  he  put  to  a  memorable  use.  It  was 
the  signature  of  the  first  volume  of  "  Modern  Painters," 
the  work  in  which  he  found  his  vocation.  The  claims 
of  Poetry  and  the  Church  had  faded  away  before  the 
new  vision  of  Ruskin  the  Art  Critic. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  BEGINNINGS  OF   FAME 

FOR  Ruskin,  the  long  break  in  his  Oxford  life  had  been 
anything  but  unfruitful.  He  had  extended  his  travels ; 
he  had  passed  by  way  of  the  Loire  and  the  Riviera  to 
Rome ;  he  had  visited  Naples,  Bologna,  Venice,  and 
Basle.  Although  often  very  ill,  he  was  never  really 
idle,  and  his  brain  was  constantly  accumulating  im- 
pressions, that,  altered  and  exalted  by  his  analytic 
thought,  were  to  provide  the  rich  material  of  his 
work.  His  pencil  was  always  employed  and  dexterity 
increased ;  the  mere  mannerism  of  the  drawing  master 
fell  away,  and  Ruskin  developed  a  style  of  his  own. 
The  centre  of  his  mental  processes  was  Turner,  always 
Turner. 

On  his  twenty-first  birthday  his  father  had  given 
him  the  Master's  "  Richmond  Bridge  "  and  "  Gosport." 
Out  of  his  redundant  pocket-money  he  had  himself 
purchased  "  Harlech  Castle,"  an  extravagance  startling 
to  his  indulgent  parent,  who  was  scarcely  prepared  for 
this  flight  of  hero-worship.  But  the  incident  brought 
an  introduction  to  the  artist,  and  a  curious  friendship 
sprang  up  between  the  elder  and  the  younger  genius. 
Now  more  than  ever  Ruskin  observed  Nature  in  terms 
of  Turner.  On  the  way  to  Naples,  he  saw  at  La 


THE    BEGINNINGS    OF    FAME    33 

Riccia  that  wonderful  effect  of  winter  landscape  which 
he  reproduced  in  a  passage  that  is  a  veritable  Turner 
in  words.  Many,  on  meeting  it  for  the  first  time  in 
"  Modern  Painters,"  must  have  exclaimed  when  they 
had  read  half-way,  "  But  this  is  a  Turner  " ;  and  it  is  with 
a  curious  thrill  that  one  reads  the  opening  sentence  of 
the  next  paragraph — "Tell  me  who  is  likest  this,  Poussin 
or  Turner  ? "  The  cunning  with  which  he  builds  up  this 
startling  climax  remains  one  of  the  chief  proofs,  per- 
haps the  chief  proof,  of  Ruskin's  power  over  language. 
This  may  be  claimed  without  disputing  the  criticism 
that  denies  classic  rank  to  the  passage  in  question. 
He  got  his  effect,  but  forced  the  means  beyond  due 
classical  restraint.  It  is  the  exuberant  effort,  one 
had  almost  said  the  trick,  of  an  exceptionally  clever 
boy,  revelling  in  newly  discovered  powers. 

Before  his  illness,  he  had  published  some  scientific 
papers  in  Loudon's  Magazine,  and  these  led  the 
Editor  to  tell  Mr.  Ruskin  that  his  son  was  certainly 
the  greatest  natural  genius  he  had  ever  known,  and 
that  one  day,  "when  both  you  and  I  are  under  the 
turf,  it  will  be  remembered  in  the  literary  history 
of  your  son's  life  that  the  first  article  of  his  which 
was  published  was  in  Loudon's  Magazine  of  Natural 
History"  The  period  following  his  restoration  to 
health  was  marked  also  by  memorable  advance  in 
his  conception  of  art.  It  was  in  the  days  just  pre- 
ceding his  final  examination,  when  he  was  reading  at 
Herne  Hill  with  Osborne  Gordon,  that  this  formative 
experience  came  to  him. 

c 


34  JOHN    RUSKIN 

During  a  walk  on  Tulse  Hill  he  began  to  draw  a 
tree  trunk  entwined  with  ivy.  Schooled  as  he  had 
been  to  arbitrary  "  composition,"  he  suddenly  revolted 
from  the  extremity  of  that  law,  in  the  recognition  that 
the  natural  disposition  of  the  ivy  was  infinitely  finer 
than  any  conventional  rearrangement  of  his  own  could 
be.  From  that  moment  he  vowed  fidelity  above  all 
things  to  Nature  herself.  To  that  hour  he  looked  back 
as  narrowly  devout  men  do  to  the  instant  of  their  con- 
version. 

One  of  the  pleasantest  periods  of  Ruskin's  life  is  to 
be  found  in  the  record  of  those  busy  days  at  Herne 
Hill,  when  the  first  volume  of  "  Modern  Painters  "  was 
in  progress. 

After  his  industrious  morning,  he  would  go  for  a 
tramp  in  the  Norwood  lanes,  and  look  in  perhaps  at 
the  Dulwich  gallery ;  or  he  might  give  Mr.  George 
Richmond  a  sitting  for  the  full-length  portrait  then 
in  progress,  or  call  on  Mr.  Windus,  whose  roomful  of 
Turner  drawings  were  invaluable  to  a  young  man 
fighting  Turner's  battle.  In  the  evening  he  wrote 
again  for  an  hour  or  two,  but  there  was  no  burning  of 
midnight  oil.  Next  morning  at  breakfast  the  previous 
day's  task  was  read  over  to  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Ruskin,  who 
received  their  privilege  with  emotion,  not  untouched 
with  tears.  We  know  that  breakfast  table  from  "A 
Conversation,"  one  of  the  birthday  poems.  It  is 
dramatic  in  form  and  serio-comic.  Mrs.  Ruskin  feels 
the  touch  of  winter  and  complains  of  draughts.  Mr. 


THE    BEGINNINGS    OF    FAME     35 

Ruskin  sighs  for  the  skies  of  Italy,  whereat  Master 
Ruskin  interjects  soulfully : 

"  Skies  so  blue,  over  you." 

He  permits  himself  to  speak  only  six  times  in  the 
dialogue.  The  sayings  are  characteristic  of  the  meteor- 
ologist and  of  the  colourist.  Mr.  Ruskin  longs  for  the 
beauties  of  Italian  architecture,  and  the  son  echoes : 

"  Gems  and  marbles,  rich  and  rare." 

But  that  scene  was  several  years  earlier.  One  may 
be  sure  that  in  1842,  when  the  newly  written  sheets 
of  "  Modern  Painters  "  were  the  breakfast-table  topic, 
Mrs.  Ruskin  had  no  care  for  winter  and  rough 
weather. 

The  rough  weather  lay  ahead — for  the  young 
author.  John  Ruskin  was  ready  to  step  down  into 
the  lists  of  the  world  for  the  combat  of  half  a  century. 
His  challenge  to  preconceived  ideas  rang  clear  from 
the  pages  of  that  first  volume,  published  (without 
previous  hawking  about,  as  foolish  rumour  says)  by 
Messrs.  Smith,  Elder  in  May  1843.  The  new  doctrines 
raised  a  storm.  Ruskin,  already  somewhat  eminent, 
found  himself  in  the  front  rank  of  fame.  The  Oxford 
Graduate's  bold  heresies  were  attacked  in  the  Press 
with  all  the  slashing  freedom  of  reviewers  in  those  out- 
spoken times.  The  defendant,  Turner,  was  embar- 
rassed ;  he,  who  "  never  moved  in  these  matters,"  had 
been  forced  by  young  enthusiasm  into  the  central  place 


36  JOHN    KUSKIN 

of  a  movement.  And  so  the  battle  raged,  amid  scandal 
and  admiration.  A  sad  innovator,  but  a  great  writer ! 
Such  language  was  a  revelation,  although  the  doctrine 
might  be  strange.  It  was  terrible  to  hear  Claude  and 
Poussin  arraigned,  to  see  the  accepted  favourites  of 
the  hour  set  on  a  subordinate  plane  to  the  inexplicable 
later  Turner,  who  had  swerved  from  things  people 
could  understand  towards  a  manner  directly  in  defiance 
of  truth,  so  that  he  was  "  imagined  by  the  majority  of 
the  public  to  paint  more  falsehood  and  less  fact  than 
any  other  known  master."  "  We  shall  see,"  says 
Ruskin,  "with  what  reason." 

The  full  exposition  of  his  case,  with  many  digres- 
sions, was  to  occupy  him  for  nearly  twenty  years. 
During  that  period,  Ruskin's  untiring  brain  threw  off1 
by-products  that  would  have  served  very  well  for  the 
life-work  of  lesser  men.  His  succeeding  works,  how- 
ever, were  to  be  written  amid  new  surroundings  ;  for 
what  we  may  call,  for  the  purposes  of  this  sketch,  the 
first  Herne  Hill  period,  was  drawing  to  a  close.  In- 
crease of  material  prosperity,  their  son's  fame,  a  desire 
to  rise  to  the  occasion  and  to  return  distinguished 
hospitality  in  a  distinguished  way,  led  the  elder  Rus- 
kins  to  seek  a  more  commodious  home.  "  Subtlest 
of  temptations,"  the  son  called  it,  when  he  told  how  it 
cost  his  father  much  of  his  former  happiness. 

The  year  that  saw  the  publication  of  "Modern 
Painters  "  was  that  of  the  Ruskins'  removal  to  51  Den- 
mark Hill.  There,  with  frequent  intervals  of  travel 


•HT^V  //.>  &•-- 
••' 

v    iY   '  '  fjt'^W-'F*  T''V''^"'    '^  '',        -.-    Ml 

^A^  '  tl 


Krrmoull 


THE    BEGINNINGS    OF    FAME     37 

abroad,  and  with  one  brief  interlude,  to  be  hereafter 
mentioned  in  a  single  word,  John  Ruskin  lived  and 
worked  until,  having  laid  both  his  parents  to  rest,  he 
turned  northward  and  sought  those  "  Gates  of  the 
Hills,  whence  one  returns  not." 


CHAPTER  V 

"THE  INDUSTRY  OF  MID-LIFE" 

WITH  the  new  home  on  Denmark  Hill  as  a  base  of 
operations,  John  Ruskin  sent  his  "line  out  through 
all  the  earth."  He  went  far  afield  for  his  material, 
but  for  the  most  part  his  actual  writing  was  done  in 
the  new  study,  of  which,  as  well  as  of  the  house,  he 
has  left  a  minute  record,  in  that  chapter  of  Prosterita 
entitled  "  The  State  of  Denmark." 

It  was  to  his  parents  "  a  peaceful  yet  cheerful  and, 
pleasantly,  in  its  suburban  manner,  dignified,  abode  of 
their  declining  years."  For  his  own  part  he  confesses 
that  the  place  had  little  to  endear  it,  although  it  had 
every  good  in  it  except  nearness  to  a  stream.  The 
old  passion  for  running  water,  discovered  on  the  banks 
of  Tay  and  by  the  Springs  of  Wandel,  was  still  alive 
and  clamant — never  to  be  stilled,  in  fact,  while  life 
endured — and  Ruskin  looked  back  with  regret  to  that 
early  unaccomplished  plan  of  digging  a  model  canal 
with  real  locks,  which  had  been  one  of  his  dreams  at 
Herne  Hill. 

The  new  house  stood  in  seven  acres  of  ground, 
meadow,  orchard,  and  kitchen-garden  ;  there  was  a  lawn 
on  which  the  breakfast-room  opened,  that  room  which, 
he  notes,  was  extremely  pretty  when  its  walls  were 


"THE  INDUSTRY  OF  MID-LIFE"    39 

mostly  covered  with  lakes  by  Turner  and  doves  by 
Hunt.  The  dining-  and  drawing-rooms  were  "  spacious 
enough  for  our  grandest  receptions — never  more  than 
twelve  at  dinner."  Guests  usual  on  a  birthday  were 
Turner,  Prout,  Stanfield,  Leslie,  Mulready,  and  Roberts; 
a  company  where  respect  went  hand  in  hand  with 
understanding,  while  the  talk  ranged  from  art  (except 
when  Turner  was  there)  to  the  last  subtleties  of — sherry. 

As  for  the  great  man's  own  room,  fifteen  feet  by 
five-and-twenty  inside  the  bookcases,  it  was  distinct, 
as  his,  only  by  its  large  oblong  table  around  which 
the  rest  of  the  available  space  made  a  passage.  The 
lighting  was  awkward,  from  two  windows  forming  a 
bow,  blank  in  the  middle,  giving  a  cross-light  that 
considerably  fretted  the  student.  Above  was  his  bed- 
room, with  command  of  the  morning  clouds,  until 
the  encroaching  builder  stole  that  inestimable  aid  to 
healthy  thought.  "  In  such  stateliness  of  civic  domicile 
the  industry  of  mid-life  now  began." 

Of  that  giant  industry  it  is  hopeless  to  give  any 
adequate  account  in  this  brief  study.  The  most  that 
can  be  done  is  to  indicate,  at  the  risk  of  tedium, 
the  chronology  of  Ruskin's  writings,  and  the  con- 
tributory journeyings.  With  the  ground  cleared,  once 
for  ah1,  by  that  synoptic  survey,  we  follow  Ruskin 
at  leisure,  and  with  some  liberty  of  selection  and 
omission,  to  the  chief  scenes  of  his  inspiration  in 
France,  Switzerland,  and  Italy.  And  unto  these  last 
we  shall  come  not  in  the  spirit  of  the  guide-book, 
but  seeking  by  salient  illustration  to  catch  at  least 


40  JOHN  RUSKIN 

a  glimpse  of  the  things  Ruskin  himself  saw,  and  to 
learn  if  possible  in  what  temper  he  approached  them. 

As  a  central  point,  it  is  well  to  remember  that 
"Modern  Painters "  went  steadily  forward  from  1842 
until  1860,  the  dates  of  the  first  and  fifth  volumes. 
The  second  appeared  in  1846.  Preparatory  to  its 
production  he  had  travelled  in  Switzerland,  and  had 
studied  old  masters  in  the  Louvre,  in  1844.  In  1845 
he  made  his  first  tour  alone,  visiting,  with  memorable 
results,  Pisa ;  Lucca  and  Florence,  where  he  took  up 
the  study  of  Christian  Art ;  Verona,  which  gave  colour 
to  all  his  thought  and  teaching ;  and  Venice,  where 
he  awoke  to  the  meaning  of  Tintoret.  The  year 
1846  found  him  passing  through  France  and  the 
Jura,  to  Geneva,  then  over  Mont  Cenis  into  Italy. 
Next  year  he  was  in  Scotland.  In  1848  he  began 
a  pilgrimage  to  the  English  cathedrals,  and  visited 
Amiens,  Paris,  and  Normandy,  and  the  same  year 
he  threw  off  that  wonderful  parergon,  "  The  Seven 
Lamps  of  Architecture." 

That  work  was  not  written  at  Denmark  Hill,  but 
at  81  Park  Street,  his  London  residence  during  his 
short  and  unfortunate  married  life.  To  Switzerland 
he  went  again  the  next  year,  and  spent  the  winter 
in  Venice  studying  missals  and  architecture.  In  1850 
he  wrote  the  first  volume  of  «'  The  Stones  of  Venice  " 
at  Park  Street.  1851  is  memorable  for  the  pamphlet 
"Notes  on  Sheepfolds,"  purchased  by  at  least  one  simple 
shepherd  in  the  belief  that  it  was  a  practical  guide  to 
his  calling.  Too  late,  the  good  man  discovered  that 


"THE  INDUSTRY  OF  MID-LIFE"    41 

he  had  paid  his  florin  for  a  tract  on  ecclesiastical 
polity.  The  same  year  Ruskin  made  the  acquaint- 
ance of  Carlyle  and  Frederick  Denison  Maurice,  de- 
fended the  Pre-Raphaelites,  travelled  again  in  France 
and  Switzerland,  and  spent  the  winter  and  the  fol- 
lowing spring  in  Venice.  On  December  19  Turner 
died,  and  Ruskin  heard  that  he  had  been  named  an 
executor — a  trust  resigned  as  to  the  letter  of  the 
law,  but  discharged  with  how  great  a  fidelity  of 
spirit  the  Turner  drawings  in  the  National  Gallery 
declare ;  for  by  Ruskin's  infinite  labour  they  were 
at  length  rescued  from  neglect  and  arranged. 

The  second  and  third  volumes  of  "  The  Stones 
of  Venice"  were  written  in  1852.  In  1853  Ruskin 
appeared  first  as  a  lecturer,  delivering  at  Edinburgh 
his  course  on  "  Architecture  and  Painting."  To  Swit- 
zerland again  in  1854  with  his  parents,  he  devoted 
himself  to  drawing,  and  on  his  return  he  founded 
his  Working  Men's  College.  In  1855  he  fluttered 
the  dovecotes  of  Art  with  his  first  "  Academy  Notes," 
so  destructive  to  the  mere  market  value  of  some 
men's  work  that  Punch  introduced  a  sad  Academician 
singing  :— 

"  I  paints  and  paints, 
Hears  no  complaints, 

And  sells  before  I'm  dry  ; 
Till  savage  Ruskin 
Sticks  his  tusk  in, 

And  nobody  will  buy/' 

That  year  (1855)  saw  the  second  and  third  volumes 


42  JOHN  RUSKIN 

of  "  Modern  Painters."  In  1856  he  wrote  the  "  Ele- 
ments of  Drawing,"  and  the  following  year  is  memor- 
able for  two  lectures — "  Imagination  in  Architecture," 
delivered  hefore  the  Architectural  Association ;  and 
"  Political  Economy  of  Art,"  at  Manchester.  He  was 
occupied  also  with  the  arrangement  of  the  Turner 
drawings.  "  Conventional  Art  "  was  spoken  at  South 
Kensington,  "  Work  of  Iron "  at  Tunbridge  Wells 
in  1858,  and  he  made  his  official  Report  on  the 
Turner  Bequest.  This  busy  year  also  held  his  "  Study 
of  Art,"  an  address  to  St.  Martin's  School.  Going 
alone  to  Switzerland  and  Italy,  he  studied  Veronese 
at  Turin.  On  his  return  he  gave  the  Inaugural 
Address  at  the  Cambridge  School  of  Art.  Three 
lectures  mark  1859— the  "Unity  of  Art,"  at  the 
Royal  Institution ;  "  Modern  Manufacture  and  Design," 
at  Bradford;  "Switzerland,"  at  the  Working  Men's 
College.  This  year's  tour,  the  last  he  made  with 
his  parents,  was  in  Germany.  "Religious  Art"  was 
delivered  to  the  Working  Men's  College  in  1860, 
and  at  length  the  volume  of  the  book  of  "  Modern 
Painters  "  was  closed. 

But  there  was  no  resting.  At  Chamouni  he  wrote 
"  Unto  this  Last,"  and  stepped  forth  a  heretic  declared. 
The  Cornhill  published  the  papers  for  a  time,  but  at 
last  Thackeray  and  Smith  said  nay.  Froude  gave  a 
second  series  another  chance  in  Fraser's  Magazine,  but 
at  the  fourth  essay  he  too  cried,  "  Hold,  enough  1 " 
For  the  first  time  Ruskin  bit  the  gag.  He  had 
turned  his  back  on  orthodoxy;  he  had  declared  that 


"THE  INDUSTRY  OF  MID-LIFE"    43 

the  time  was  out  of  joint — he  had  even  begun  to  in- 
quire how  it  was  to  be  set  right.  The  world,  as  ever, 
would  have  none  of  such  doctrine.  The  Fraser  papers 
were  afterwards  published  as  "  Munera  Pulveris." 

The  studies  of  1862  and  of  1863  were  of  Luini  at 
Milan  and  of  the  Limestone  Alps  :  1864,  the  year  of  his 
father's  death,  saw  the  lectures  "  Traffic  "  and  "  Kings' 
Treasuries  and  Queens'  Gardens,"  next  year  incorpo- 
rated in  "  Sesame  and  Lilies,"  his  most  popular  book. 
Of  immediately  following  works  names  and  dates  must 
suffice:  "Work  and  Play,"  a  lecture;  "The  Study 
of  Architecture  "  and  "  War,"  the  last  given  at  Wool- 
wich (1865);  "Time  and  Tide"  (letters  to  Thomas 
Dixon,  a  working  cork-cutter);  "  Modern  Art"  (1867); 
"The  Mystery  of  Life"  and  "The  Three-legged  Stool 
of  Art"  (1868).  "Flamboyant  Architecture  of  the 
Somme,"  "The  Queen  of  the  Air"  (Greek  Myths 
of  Cloud  and  Storm),  "  Hercules  of  Camarina,"  and 
"The  Future  of  England"  were  the  fruit  of  1869. 
He  revisited  France,  Switzerland,  Verona,  and  Venice, 
where  the  news  reached  him  that  he  had  been  elected 
Slade  Professor  of  Fine  Art  at  Oxford. 

Next  year  Ruskin  took  up  his  professorial  duties 
and  delivered  his  first  and  second  courses.  Before 
the  Royal  Institution  he  gave  his  "  Verona  and  its 
Rivers,"  one  of  the  loveliest  examples  of  his  descrip- 
tive and  expository  style.  It  was  the  memorable 
year  of  the  first  Fors  Clavigera.  Again  he  moved 
through  Switzerland  and  Italy ;  he  made  a  fruitful  study 
of  coins  in  the  British  Museum  for  his  Oxford  course 


44  JOHN  RUSKIN 

on  Greek  Art,  in  which  he  now  found  a  new  signi- 
ficance ;  and  the  Woolwich  Cadets  were  privileged  to 
hear  him  once  more  in  the  "  Story  of  Arachne."  He 
gave  them  also,  in  1872,  "  The  Bird  of  Calm."  His 
Slade  lectures  for  the  year  were  "  The  Eagle's  Nest " 
and  "  Ariadne  Florentina."  Corpus  now  gave  him 
an  Honorary  Fellowship,  which  meant  an  Oxford 
lodging  of  his  own,  "between  a  Turkey  carpet  and 
a  Titian,"  under  the  very  shadow  of  Christ  Church. 
That  Society  had  already  honoured  him  in  1858  at 
her  first  election  of  Honorary  Students. 

Here  we  reach  the  close  of  the  Denmark  Hill 
period.  After  his  mother's  death  in  1871,  Ruskin 
looked  for  and  found  a  long-desired  retreat  among  the 
Lakes.  From  W.  J.  Linton  he  purchased  Brantwood, 
by  Coniston  Water,  and  there  in  1872  he  made  his 
home  until  the  end.  Before  we  leave  the  associations 
of  South  London,  it  should  be  noted,  in  a  retrospective 
word,  that  in  1852,  when  he  left  Park  Street,  Ruskin 
took  the  house  on  Herne  Hill  next  door  to  his  old  home. 
There  he  finished  "  The  Stones  of  Venice."  In  1868 
he  bought  No.  28  itself,  and  used  it  for  his  rougher 
collection  of  minerals,  keeping  only  his  finest  specimens 
at  Denmark  Hill.  His  reasons,  given  in  a  letter,  are 
worth  recording : — 

"  first,  affection  for  the  old  house : — my  second,  want 
of  room ; — my  third,  the  incompatibility  of  hammering, 
washing  and  experimenting  on  stones,  with  cleanliness 
in  my  stores  of  drawing.  And  my  fourth  is  the  power 


r;'5:    S'Ss'lr1^*  :«ry'A-*-">A-,, 

<         I  -       '       f-  •         :•' 

-^=-p  -  f' ' .  I 

,     I  .  i-rx-sr.         jl          I 


"THE  INDUSTRY  OF  MID-LIFE"    41 

1  shall  have,  when  I  want  to  do  anything  very  quietly, 
of  going  up  the  hill  and  thinking  it  out  in  the  old 
garden,  where  your  green- house  still  stands,  and  the 
aviary — without  fear  of  interruption  from  callers." 

But  Dr.  Dryasdust  has  held  us  too  long  with  these 
statistical  details.  It  is  time,  without  much  burden  of 
chronology,  to  glance  at  the  chief  scenes  of  Ruskin's 
inspiration  in  France,  Switzerland,  and  Italy. 


CHAPTER  VI 

FRANCE,  SWITZERLAND,  AND  ITALY 

"  THERE  have  been,  in  sum,  three  centres  of  my  life's 
thought:  Rouen,  Geneva,  and  Pisa."  So  Ruskin 
made  avowal  when  he  came  late  in  life  to  review  bygone 
things.  All  that  he  did  at  Venice  he  held  to  be  but 
bye- work,  on  the  strange  plea  that  he  dealt  there  with 
things  hitherto  unknown  or  falsely  stated.  Because 
he  toiled  after  truth  in  Venetian  history,  because  his 
interest  lay  in  "  Tintoret  virtually  unseen,  Veronese 
unfelt,  Carpaccio  not  so  much  as  named,"  because,  too, 
something  was  due  to  his  fondness  for  gliding  about 
in  gondolas,  he  put  Venice  in  the  second  place  among 
his  instructors.  The  others  had  accepted  lessons  ready 
to  his  hand.  Venice  he  regarded,  by  a  strange  subtlety 
of  thought,  as  a  receiver  rather  than  a  giver.  He 
taught  her  to  read  her  own  history  aright,  to  acknow- 
ledge her  greatest  painters.  The  receiver,  therefore, 
is  less  blessed.  And  the  tremendous  work  itself  was 
pastime,  because  of  those  gliding  gondolas. 

It  is  a  delightful  sophistry,  but,  like  all  the  Ruskin 
sophistries,  sincere.  Later  came  the  inevitable  qualifi- 
cation. To  the  three  thought-centres  he  must  add 
Verona,  because  she  gave  the  colouring  to  all  they 
taught,  and  virtually  represented  the  fate  and  the 


FRANCE,  SWITZERLAND,  ITALY    47 

beauty  of  Italy  to  him.  Of  this  he  has  left  us  proof 
in  the  passage  that  records  his  Pisgah-vision  of  Italian 
story  as  he  looked,  from  the  heights  above  Verona, 
across  the  Lombard  plain. 

With  so  much  to  be  examined  in  few  words,  this 
meagre  sketch  can  take  only  the  lightest  account  of 
Rouen.  For  critical  work  there  the  reader  must  turn 
to  the  "  Seven  Lamps."  In  the  Norman  capital 
Ruskin  worked  out  for  himself  his  grammar  of  the 
flamboyant  Gothic,  approaching  his  task,  as  ever,  by 
easy  stages,  and  reading,  during  that  journey  of  1835, 
a  preface  in  the  architecture  of  Abbeville.  Not  yet 
ready  for  Rouen  itself,  he  read  the  foreword  gladly,  feel- 
ing that  "  here  was  entrance  into  immediately  healthy 
labour  and  joy."  In  time  he  was  to  appreciate  Rouen 
as  a  critic,  and  the  preface  became  an  interpretation. 
On  that  first  visit  the  cathedral  gave  him,  in  a  purely 
personal  sense,  a  thrill  of  delightful  contrast,  just  such 
a  contrast  as  the  Ruskin  way  of  life  must  have  pro- 
duced time  and  again  : — 

"  Imagine  the  change  between  one  Sunday  and 
the  next, — from  the  morning  service  in  this  building 
(Dr.  Andrews'  chapel)  attended  by  the  families  of  the 
small  shop-keepers  in  the  Walworth  Road,  in  their 
Sunday  trimmings  (our  plumber's  wife  sat  in  the  next 
pew  .  .  .  ) ;  fancy  the  change  from  this,  to  high 
mass  in  Rouen  Cathedral,  its  nave  filled  by  the  white- 
capped  peasantry  of  half  Normandy  1 " 

A  fuller  account  of  Rouen  and  its  cathedral  was 


48  JOHN  RUSKIN 

among  the  unfulfilled  projects  of  Ruskin's  later  life. 
Of  Abbeville,  and  his  "  cheerful,  unalloyed,  unwearying 
pleasure  "  in  getting  sight  of  the  city  and  St.  Wulfran 
on  a  fine  summer  afternoon,  he  has  left  a  record,  in  one 
phrase  of  which,  if  it  reflect  an  actual  thought  of  that 
5th  of  June  1835,  and  not  the  afterthought  of  years,  we 
may  trace  the  germ  of  doctrine  expounded — with  what 
mastery  and  knowledge  ! — in  the  first  volume  of  "  The 
Stones  of  Venice" — the  unity  of  church  Gothic  and 
domestic  Gothic.  Examine  in  particular  the  use  of 
the  word  "faithful,"  and  learn  that  Ruskin  used  no 
epithet  at  random.  He  has  spoken  of  the  churches 
of  Abbeville,  and  continues  : — 

"  Outside,  the  faithful  old  town  gathered  itself  and 
nestled  under  their  buttresses,  like  a  brood  beneath  the 
mother's  wings." 

In  those  days  the  kinship  of  house  and  church  had 
not  been  disguised  or  swept  out  of  remembrance  by 
modern  desecrators.  St.  Wulfran's  and  St.  Riquier's 
walls  and  towers  were  alike  coeval  with  the  gabled 
timber  houses  of  which  the  busier  streets  chiefly  con- 
sisted when  Ruskin  first  saw  Abbeville. 

One  could  linger  long  enough  over  the  story  of 
those  posting  journeys  to  the  South,  with  their  digres- 
sions to  Dijon,  where,  in  after-years,  at  the  Hotel  de  la 
Cloche,  the  master  pointed  out  the  room  where,  in  his 
wash-hand  basin,  had  been  bitten  "with  savage  care- 
lessness "  the  last  plate  for  the  "  Seven  Lamps."  But 
the  limits  of  these  pages  forbid. 


FRANCE,  SWITZERLAND,  ITALY   49 

There  was  a  time  when  Ruskin  wrote  of  Venice  : 
"  Thank  God  I  am  here ;  it  is  the  Paradise  of  cities. 
This,  and  Chamouni,  are  my  two  bournes  of  Earth." 
Once  more  the  correcting  hand  descended  on  these 
words.  When  he  wrote  that  rhapsody,  he  knew  neither 
Rouen  nor  Pisa,  though  he  had  seen  both.  Geneva, 
he  notes,  is  meant  to  include  Chamouni  in  the  triad 
of  "tutresses" — a  word,  by  the  way,  not  of  the  first 
choice,  and  unworthy  of  his  style. 

"My  true  mother  town  of  Geneva,"  Ruskin  ex- 
claims, when  he  tells  how  it  was  there,  in  church,  to 
the  accompaniment  of  braying  organ  and  doggerel 
hymns,  that  the  impulse  came  to  him  which  threw  his 
new  thought  into  the  form  of  "  Modern  Painters." 
He  repaid  his  debt  in  a  wonderful  passage  of  descrip- 
tion, enshrining  the  memory  of  the  little  town,  the 
canton  four  miles  square,  in  the  days  of  his  early  visits, 
before  the  place  was  spoiled  by  "  the  people  who  have 
hold  of  it  now,  with  their  polypous  knots  of  houses, 
communal  with  '  London,  Paris,  and  New  York.' " 
He  stayed  on  his  first  visits  (1883,  1835)  at  the  Hotel 
des  Etrangers,  "  one  of  those  country  houses  open  to 
the  polite  stranger,  some  half-mile  out  of  the  gates." 
There  he  rejoiced  in  a  Geneva  "  composed  of  a  cluster 
of  water-mills,  a  street  of  penthouses,  two  wooden 
bridges,  two  dozen  of  stone  houses  on  a  little  hill,  and 
three  or  four  perpendicular  lanes  up  and  down  the 
hill."  He  saw  it  as  a  community  well-ordered,  the 
home  of  honest  industries,  this  bird's  nest  of  a  place, 
centre  of  religious  and  social  thought  to  all  Europe, 

D 


50  JOHN  RUSKIN 

"  Saussure's  school  and  Calvin's,  —  Rousseau's  and 
Byron's,— Turner's— " 

Here  Ruskin  the  humorist  looks  out.  He  was 
ready,  he  confessed,  to  add  that  Geneva  was  his  own 
school  as  well,  "but  I  didn't  write  all  that  last  page 
to  end  so." 

The  outsider  who  sees  most  of  the  game  will 
perhaps  hazard  the  opinion  that  kindred  Chamouni 
was  even  more  closely  interwoven  with  Ruskin's  life 
and  work.  It  was  the  inspiration  of  early  poems  (a 
small  matter,  but  worth  noting) ;  it  was  the  base  of 
his  constant  studies  in  the  geological  structure  of  the 
Alps,  scene  of  close  observation  of  plants  and  clouds, 
subject  of  many  drawings.  There  he  grappled  with 
the  ethical  problems  predestined  in  "The  Nature  of 
Gothic,"  and  at  Mornex  he  gave  them  their  first  formal 
expression  in  "  Unto  this  Last,"  fruit  of  a  deep  anta- 
gonism to  his  times;  thither  in  1879  he  longed  to 
return,  but  glacial  changes  had  made  Chamouni  a 
"  desolated  home  to  him  " — for  vanishing  glaciers  had 
betrayed  him.  But  it  was  at  Chamouni,  after  all,  in 
1882,  that  he  wrote  his  delightful,  urbane  foreshadow- 
ing of  Prceterita,  the  Epilogue  to  the  reprint  of 
"  Modern  Painters."  He  had  a  dream  to  establish  his 
life  on  some  parcel  of  land  near  the  chain  of  Mont 
Blanc,  and  once  he  actually  bought  a  piece  of  meadow 
in  Chamouni,  but  only  to  sell  it  again,  on  foreseeing 
the  approach  of  the  inevitable  tourist,  and  consequent 
ruin  of  those  solitudes. 

From  the  Diary  of  1844,  a  fragment  on  Chamouni 


FRANCE,  SWITZERLAND,  ITALY    51 

seemed  to  Ruskin  perhaps  worth  keeping.    His  sparing 
hand  is  justified : — 

"  28th  June,  half-past  ten. — I  never  was  dazzled  by 
moonlight  until  now ;  but  as  it  rose  behind  the  Mont 
Blanc  du  Tacul  the  full  moon  almost  blinded  me :  it 
burst  forth  into  the  sky  like  a  vast  star.  For  an  hour 
before,  the  aiguilles  had  appeared  as  dark  masses  against 
a  sky  looking  as  transparent  as  clear  sea,  edged  at 
their  summits  with  fleeces  of  cloud  breaking  into  a 
glorious  spray  and  foam  of  white  fire.  A  meteor  fell 
over  the  Dome  as  the  moon  rose :  now  it  is  so  intensely 
bright  that  I  cannot  see  the  Mont  Blanc  underneath 
it ;  the  form  is  lost  in  its  light." 

Excellent  as  it  is  in  feeling,  this  first-hand  writing 
from  a  journal  shows  how  necessary  it  was  for  Ruskin 
that  his  greater  works  should  have  been  revised  by 
Mr.  W:  H.  Harrison,  his  mentor  and  editor  for  thirty 
years.  In  his  charming  tribute  to  that  friend,  Ruskin 
is  plainly  all  at  sea  about  the  technical  reasons  for  his 
taskmaster's  severity:  but  he  took  his  castigation  like 
a  man,  rewriting  and  recasting  cheerfully. 

In  Ruskin's  account  of  Pisa  occurs  an  implicit 
explanation  of  his  curious  depreciation  of  Venice  as 
a  teacher.  When  he  came  to  any  place  prepared  for 
what  he  was  to  seek  as  material  for  learning  and  found 
it,  there  he  recognised  an  informing  influence.  At  his 
first  sight  of  Pisa,  in  1840,  he  was  impressed  by  the 
purity  of  her  architecture,  but  he  had  too  little  know- 
ledge to  make  progress.  His  guides  were  chiefly 


52  JOHN  RUSKIN 

Byron  and  Shelley.  But  in  1845  he  had  read  enough 
of  Dante  and  of  Sismondi's  "  Italian  Republics  "  to  know 
what  he  had  to  seek.  His  picture  of  his  works  and 
days  there  is  altogether  amiable.  Still  orthodox,  he 
found  in  the  frescoes  of  the  Campo  Santo  the  entire 
doctrine  of  Christianity.  He  copied  the  frescoes,  then 
rapidly  vanishing  to  make  way  for  civic  monuments; 
he  sketched  in  the  streets  and  drew  admiring  crowds  of 
companionable — not  common — Italians,  in  whom  he 
recognised  their  wonderful  natural  gift  for  knowing 
what  was  right  in  a  picture. 

At  Pisa  Ruskin  made  good  friends  with  the  Abbe* 
Rossini,  Professor  of  Fine  Art,  and  heaped  coals  of  fire 
on  his  head  by  going  patiently  to  hear  his  great  lecture 
on  "  The  Beautiful, "  although  that  morning  the  Abbs' 
had  dismissed  Turner  with  a  superficial  word,  "  Yes, 
yes,  an  imitator  of  Salvator."  Ruskin's  only  revenge 
was  a  conviction,  after  the  lecture,  that  he  knew  a 
good  deal  more  about  the  Beautiful  than  the  professor. 
That  excellent  man  in  turn  made  ample  amends  by 
having  a  scaffolding  put  up  to  enable  a  future  Professor 
of  Fine  Art  in  another  place  to  make  partial  records 
of  the  frescoes.  And  thus — 

"  The  days  that  began  in  the  cloister  of  the  Campo 
Santo  usually  ended  by  my  getting  up  on  the  roof  of 
Santa  Maria  della  Spina,  and  sitting  in  the  sunlight  that 
transfused  the  warm  marbles  of  its  pinnacles  till  the 
unabated  brightness  went  down  beyond  the  arches  of 
the  Pont-a-Mare, — the  few  footsteps  and  voices  of  the 
twilight  fell  silent  in  the  streets,  and  the  city  and  her 


FRANCE,  SWITZERLAND,  ITALY    53 

mountains  stood  mute  as  a  dream,   beyond  the  soft 
eddying  of  Arno." 

Needless,  perhaps,  to  point  out  that  even  here,  in 
words  written  a  good  forty  years  later,  despite  Dante 
and  Sismondi,  the  influence  of  Shelley  is  still  para- 
mount. 

These,  then,  were  Ruskin's  three  great  teachers, 
and  such,  in  the  lightest  outline,  were  the  impressions 
he  drew  from  them  while  his  mind  was  still  plastic ; 
although  it  is  well  to  remember  that  his  account  is 
written,  for  the  most  part,  with  the  hand  and  thought 
of  ripe  experience. 

Of  Lucca,  where  Quercia's  Ilaria  del  Caretto  became 
for  Ruskin  his  ideal  of  Christian  sculpture,  the  mere 
mention  must  suffice.  Florence,  at  first  grievously 
misunderstood,  at  length  took  her  true  place;  in 
witness  whereof — "Val  d'Arno"  (most  charming  of 
the  Slade  lectures),  the  "  Laws  of  Fe'sole,"  and  passages 
innumerable  throughout  the  works. 

The  central  point  of  Florence  was,  for  Ruskin, 
Giotto's  Campanile,  lovingly  remembered  in  the 
frontispiece  to  "  The  Seven  Lamps."  "  Mornings  in 
Florence  "  records  his  vision,  one  of  the  most  significant 
things  in  all  his  teaching,  that  tells  how  the  last  tradi- 
tions of  Faith  and  Hope  of  the  Jewish  and  Gentile 
races  met  for  their  beautiful  labour  at  the  foot  of  that 
Tower.  He  begs  the  pilgrim  to  get  right  the  little 
piece  of  geography  fixing  the  local  relation  of  the 
Campanile,  the  Baptistery,  and  Brunelleschi's  Dome. 


54  JOHN  RUSKIN 

For  the  Baptistery  was  the  last  building  raised  on 
Earth  by  the  descendants  of  the  workmen  taught  by 
Daedalus,  the  Tower  the  loveliest  inspiration  of  the 
men  who  lifted  up  the  tabernacle  in  the  wilderness. 
Here  is  the  last  and  noblest  inspiration  of  living  Greek 
and  living  Christian  work.  And  the  Dome  was  the 
latest  example  of  the  best  Christian  architecture  just 
before  the  onset  of  decline.  Long  afterwards  Ruskin 
mourned  the  profanation  of  that  sacred  spot  by  all  the 
horrors  of  a  modernised  Italy.1 

And  what  of  Venice  ?  "  Bye-work,"  he  said. 
Possibly,  but  not  to  be  neglected.  It  was  a  "vain 
temptation,"  he  says ;  but  it  is  well  that  Ruskin  allowed 
himself  to  be  tempted.  He  was  still  a  boy  when  he 
first  saw  Venice,  and  the  beginning  of  everything  was 
the  sight  of  the  gondola  beak  coming  actually  inside 
the  door  of  Danieli's  hotel.  Exquisite  sensation  for 
Master  John  Ruskin !  Of  tfie  approach  to  the  city  he 
has  left  us  his  impressions  in  one  of  those  long,  deliberate 
passages — minute  but  never  tedious — in  which  he  plays 
the  cunning  cicerone,  who  withholds  and  withholds, 
until  his  hearer  is  ripe  for  the  effect.  Sometimes  it 
comes  with  a  gorgeous  blaze  of  colour.  Not  so  at  the 
Vestibule  of  V  enice. 

He  leads  us  out  on  an  autumnal  morning  from  the 
dark  eastern  gateway  of  Padua,  and  so  on  for  hours 

1  "A  stand  for  hackney-coaches,  cigars,  spitting  and  harlot- 
planned  fineries."  Students  of  Fors  Clavigera  will  recall  in  that 
last  phrase  of  censure  the  fierce  old  man's  plain  words  on  the 
provenance  of  high-heeled  shoes. 


FRANCE,  SWITZERLAND,  ITALY  55 

through  flat  lands,  past  the  tall  white  tower  of  Dolo, 
until  we  come  among  the  divided  waters  of  the  Brenta. 
Then  at  Mestre  appears  the  extremity  of  a  canal,  black, 
it  seems,  with  stagnation ;  but  no,  it  is  covered  with 
the  black  boats  of  Venice.  Enter  one,  to  try  if  they 
be  real  boats  or  not,  and  glide  across  the  yielding  water, 
that  seems  to  let  the  boat  sink  into  soft  vacancy,  noting 
as  you  go  (for  your  guide  is  the  hill-man  Ruskin)  how 
all  round  the  horizon  lie  the  Alps  of  Bassano.  Out  of 
the  water  before  you  rises  at  last  what  seems  to  be  the 
suburb  of  an  English  manufacturing  town — "four  or 
five  domes,  a  sullen  cloud  of  smoke  issuing  from  the 
belfry  of  a  church. 

"  It  is  Venice." 

Thus  quietly,  with  an  intentional  hint  of  anti-climax, 
he  approaches  "The  Throne,"  where  there  is  no  stint 
of  glories.  He  shows  us  the  Adriatic,  a  sea  with  the 
bleak  power  of  our  own  Northern  waves,  changing  her 
angry  pallor  to  a  field  of  burnished  gold  about  the  feet 
of  St.  George  of  the  Seaweed ;  the  shadowy  Rialto 
throws  its  colossal  curve  slowly  forth  from  behind  the 
Palace  of  the  Camerlenghi,  and  the  Ducal  Palace, 
"flushed  with  its  sanguined  veins,  looks  to  the  snowy 
dome  of  our  Lady  of  Salvation." 

But  we  must  beware.  This  is  a  Venice  that  Enrico 
Dandolo  or  Francis  Foscari  would  not  know.  Their 
Venice  lies  hidden  away  in  many  a  grass-grown  court 
and  silent  pathway  and  lightless  canal.  And  the 
Venice  to  which  Ruskin  came  first  had  been  created 
for  him,  as  for  Turner,  by  Byron.  That  Venice  is 


56  JOHN  RUSKIN 

a  mere  stage  dream,  a  thing  of  falsities  and  anach- 
ronisms, against  which  he  was  to  wage  a  long  war. 
For  when  in  1849  Ruskin  came,  with  much  material 
already  collected,  to  write  "  The  Stones  of  Venice," 
he  discovered  that  her  history  would  have  to  be  ex- 
amined anew ;  for  even  the  accepted  authorities  could 
not  agree  within  a  hundred  years  as  to  the  dates  of 
her  chief  monuments.  He  must  question  them,  stone 
by  stone.  Patiently  he  set  himself  to  read  the  riddle 
of  the  Ducal  Palace  and  of  St.  Mark's,  and  at  last 
he  could  say  that  what  he  had  found  was  truth. 

St.  Mark's  he  interpreted  as  a  piece  of  jewel- 
work  on  the  grand  scale,  in  the  sense  of  art:  in  the 
light  of  his  inevitable  ethics,  "No  city  had  such  a 
Bible."  It  is  a  mighty  humanity,  perfect  and  proud, 
hiding  no  weakness  beneath  the  mantle,  gaining  no 
greatness  from  the  diadem.  All  that  he  said  of  it 
in  the  earlier  volumes  he  would  have  set  aside  in 
later  days  for  the  more  condensed  study,  "  St.  Mark's 
Rest,"  but  those  who  care  most  for  his  writings  have 
not  agreed  with  this  judgment.  Yet  it  is  well  not  to 
neglect  "  St.  Mark's  Rest,"  were  it  only  for  the  hints 
of  compensation  that  came  to  Ruskin  amid  a  ruined 
and  desolated  Venice,  as  she  seemed  to  him  then. 

There  in  later  days  he  fell  in  love  with  Carpaccio's 
St.  Ursula,  worshipping  her,  someone  has  finely  said, 
as  a  sincere  Athenian  might  have  worshipped  the 
Queen  of  the  Air.  And  in  this  temper,  which  one 
may  perhaps  call  Ruskin 's  meteoric  mood,  he  had 
new  visions  of  Venetian  history,  not  in  her  painting 


FRANCE,  SWITZERLAND,  ITALY    57 

only  but  in  her  buildings.  Take,  as  a  single  instance, 
his  interpretation  of  the  dream  of  Magnus  of  Altinum ; 
that  quaint  scripture  telling  how  Messer  Jesus  Christ 
Our  Lord  showed  that  where  a  red  cloud  rested 
there  men  should  build  the  Church  of  St.  Salvador, 
and  where  a  white  cloud  gleamed  Our  Lady  foretold 
that  there  should  rise  St.  Mary  the  Beautiful.  It 
is  a  subject  fitted  to  the  hand  of  the  true  air-man 
Ruskin,  he  who  in  "  Modern  Painters "  taught  the 
ways  of  the  Cloud  Flocks,  and  in  the  "  Queen  of  the 
Air  "  pleaded  jealously  for  unsullied  skies.  It  is  well 
that  he  did  not  see  the  "  air-man  "  of  to-day.  But 
to  return  to  our  Venetian  cloud  myth  and  Ruskin's 
commentary : — 

"  None  cares  to-day  whether  any  God-given  cloud 
is  white  or  red,  yet  a  perception  lingers  in  the  old 
fisherman's  eyes  of  the  difference  between  white  nebbia 
on  the  morning  sea  and  red  clouds  in  the  evening 
twilight.  And  the  Stella  Maris  comes  in  the  sea 
cloud ; — Leucothea :  but  the  Son  of  Man  on  the 
jasper  throne." 

That  use  of  Leucothea — "the  white  goddess" — 
is  overwhelming.  Ruskin  the  etymologist  was  not 
always  to  be  trusted,  but  here  his  genius  prevailed. 
Note,  too,  the  student  of  jewels  and  rock-crystals  rising 
for  a  moment  skyward  to  find  in  the  red  cloud  a 
throne  of  jasper. 

Such,  then,  was  that  notable  though  lightly  es- 
teemed bye-work. 


58  JOHN  RUSKIN 

But  Venice  meant  more  to  Ruskin  than  even 
this.  He  was  to  make  known  her  painters :  in  her 
Scuola  di  San  Rocco  he  found  assurance  of  his  own 
real  vocation.  With  that  crucial  incident  this  less 
than  outline  of  his  Venetian  experience  must  end. 
One  day  during  the  tour  of  1845,  Ruskin  and  J.  D. 
Harding  entered  for  the  first  time  the  School  of 
St.  Roch.  There  the  sight  of  Tintoret's  "Cruci- 
fixion" took  the  strength  out  of  them.  Harding 
felt  like  a  whipped  schoolboy  ;  not  so  Ruskin. 
He  writes  in  the  Epilogue  to  "  Modern  Painters," 
vol.  ii. : — 

"  I  felt  only  that  a  new  world  was  opened  to 
me,  that  I  had  seen  that  day  the  Art  of  Man  in  its 
full  majesty  for  the  first  time;  and  that  there  was 
also  a  strange  and  precious  gift  in  myself  enabling 
me  to  recognise  it,  and  therein  ennobling,  not  crush- 
ing me." 

It  has  already  been  noted  that  to  the  number  of 
his  teachers  Ruskin  added,  as  an  afterthought,  Verona, 
representative,  to  him,  of  the  fate  and  the  beauty 
of  Italy.  His  memorable  up-gathering  of  all  that 
Verona  suggested  must  be  read  at  length  in  the 
lecture  he  delivered  to  the  Royal  Institution  in  1870. 
In  its  beautiful  opening  every  side  of  his  own  interests 
and  character  is  reflected — the  worshipper  of  moun- 
tains, the  patient  geologist  and  botanist,  the  historian, 
the  artist,  the  poet,  and,  needless  to  say,  the  moralist. 
Taking  his  hearers  to  a  height  overlooking  the  city, 


FRANCE,  SWITZERLAND,  ITALY    59 

he  shows  them,  in  a  moment  of  time,  all  that  Italy 
meant  for  him.  He  points  out  the  gateway  of  the 
Goths,  the  valleys  of  the  Inn  and  of  the  Adige ;  he 
pauses  to  analyse  the  structure  of  the  promontory 
whence  he  looks  down  on  all  the  plain  between  Alp 
and  Apennine — how  it  hardens  from  limestone,  with 
knots  of  splendid  brown  jasper,  into  the  peach-blossom 
marble  of  Verona.  In  the  moat  of  the  city  he  traces 
the  cradle  of  modern  geological  science  (for  in  its 
trenching  Leonardo  first  suggested  the  true  nature 
of  fossils) ;  in  its  walls,  the  cradle  of  civic  life ;  in  its 
round  tower,  the  first  ever  embrasured  for  artillery — 
constructed  against  artillery — the  cradle  of  modern  war, 
the  beginning  of  the  end  of  all  fortification,  "  of  a 
system  that  costs  millions  a  year  and  leaves  England 
without  defence."  There  speaks  the  political  philoso- 
pher, but  in  the  main  his  reflections  are  less  prosaic. 
Twelve  miles  away  is  Mantua;1  beyond  its  fretted 
outline,  Parma ;  to  the  left,  at  the  feet  of  the 
Eugansean  Hills,  rests  Padua ;  in  the  gleam  of  the 
horizon  beyond — Venice.  And  at  our  feet  Verona, 
with  the  Scaligers'  bridge,  the  church  of  San  Zeno, 
the  remnants  of  the  Palace  of  Theodoric — Dietrich 
of  Berne. 

This  is  but  a  maimed  paraphrase  of  a  picture 
suggested,  in  slow  detail,  with  wonderful  gleams  of 
colour — the  Alps  of  Friuli  touched  by  the  sunset "  into 
a  crown  of  strange  rubies,"  bright  flowing  Adige,  blue 

1  Actually,  a  good  twenty  miles. — ED. 


60  JOHN  RUSKIN 

Lombard  plain.     The  scene  being  set,  Ruskin  gathers 
all  its  meaning  into  this : — 

"  Now  I  do  not  think  that  there  is  any  other  rock 
in  all  the  world,  from  which  the  places,  and  monuments, 
of  so  complex  and  deep  a  fragment  of  the  history  of  its 
ages  can  be  visible,  as  from  this  piece  of  crag  with  its 
blue  and  prickly  weeds.  For  you  have  thus  beneath 
you  at  once  the  birthplaces  of  Virgil  and  Livy,  the 
homes  of  Dante  and  Petrarch,  and  the  source  of  the 
most  sweet  and  pathetic  inspiration  of  your  own  Shake- 
speare ;  the  spot  where  the  civilisation  of  the  Gothic 
kingdoms  was  founded  on  the  throne  of  Theodoric, 
and  where  whatever  was  strongest  in  the  Italian  race 
redeemed  itself  into  life  by  its  leagues  against  Bar- 
barossa.  You  have  the  cradle  of  natural  science  and 
medicine  in  the  schools  of  Padua ;  the  central  light  of 
Italian  chivalry  in  the  power  of  the  Scaligers ;  the  chief 
stain  of  Italian  cruelty  in  that  of  Ezzelin ;  and  lastly, 
the  birthplace  of  the  highest  art ;  for  among  these  hills, 
or  by  this  very  Adige  bank,  were  born  Mantegna, 
Titian,  Correggio,  and  Veronese." 

"  The  only  mischief  of  the  place,"  he  wrote  in  June 
1869 — that  late  visit  paid  just  in  time  to  save  a  record 
of  the  Castelbarco  monument  before  it  was  "  restored  " 
— "  the  only  mischief  is  its  being  too  rich,  a  history  to 
every  foot  of  ground  and  a  picture  on  every  foot  of 
wall,  frescoes  fading  away  in  the  neglected  streets — like 
the  colours  of  a  dolphin." 

During  this  visit,  one  May  morning,  while  Ruskin 
was  sketching  under  a  quiet  Italian  light  in  the 


FRANCE,  SWITZERLAND,  ITALY    61 

beautiful  square  of  Verona,  Longfellow  and  his  little 
daughter  came  up  and  talked  with  him  as  he  worked. 
He  hoped  it  was  not  very  vain  of  him  to  wish  that 
if  a  photograph  could  have  been  taken  of  the  scene, 
some  people  both  in  England  and  America  would  have 
liked  copies  of  it.  But  of  the  meeting  of  two  famous 
men  in  the  meeting-place  of  so  much  history,  Ruskin's 
own  words  remain  the  only  record,  more  enduring 
than  any  sun-picture. 


CHAPTER   VII 

OXFORD   ONCE   MORE:    THE  SLADE   PROFESSOR 

FOR  nine  years  before  his  appointment  to  the  Slade 
Professorship  of  Fine  Art  at  Oxford,  Ruskin  had 
ceased  to  write  directly  on  Art.  It  gave  him  a  text, 
certainly,  but  everything  now  was  subordinated  to  his 
teaching  of  moral  and  political  philosophy.  In  "  Unto 
this  Last "  he  had,  in  striving  to  give  a  logical  defini- 
tion of  wealth,  spoken  words  that  a  materialistic  and 
money-grubbing  age  could  not  understand,  or  refused  to 
understand.  The  latter  is  possibly  nearer  the  mark.  A 
system  of  political  economy  that  scrupled  not  to  call 
the  art  of  making  oneself  rich  the  art  of  making  some 
one  else  poor,  that  postulated  upright  and  clean  dealing, 
the  production  of  only  true  and  honest  work,  and  a  just 
reward  for  the  labourer,  who  was  to  have  means  to 
command  for  himself  as  much  labour  as  he  had  ex- 
pended, could  not  hope  to  win  popular  success.  We 
have  seen  the  fate  of  these  papers  in  the  Cornhill, 
and  of  their  successors  in  Fraser's. 

What  Ruskin  sought  was  to  point  the  way  to  a 
complete  reform  of  the  social  system,  and  he  was  re- 
ceived— as  every  new  Gospeller  is  received.  For  the 
best  part  of  a  decade  he  lived  much  in  solitude,  at 
Mornex  on  the  Saleve  and  at  Chamouni,  wrestling, 

02 


OXFORD  ONCE   MORE  63 

often  in  deep  gloom  of  spirit,  with  a  froward  world. 
He  had  passed  away  from  all  orthodoxy ;  old  friends 
misunderstood  him  ;  to  his  parents  his  new  views  were 
a  sorrow.  But  his  heterodoxy  won  him  the  friendship 
and  sympathy  of  Carlyle,  who  might  have  said  to 
Ruskin,  "  Thy-doxy  is  my-doxy." 

The  Oxford  appointment  did  not  win  him  back  from 
heresy;  but  it  brought  him,  with  better  heart,  once 
more  among  the  throngs  of  men.  He  took  up  his 
duties  in  no  perfunctory  spirit,  and  completely  rewrote 
in  a  maturer  form  all  his  teaching  on  Art,  qualified,  of 
necessity,  with  his  now  inevitable  ethics.  His  first 
lecture,  delivered  on  his  birthday,  February  8,  1870, 
was  an  event  in  the  history  of  the  University.  The 
crowd  was  so  great  that  the  Slade  Professor's  lecture- 
room  could  not  hold  a  tenth  part,  and  the  audience 
adjourned  to  the  Sheldonian  Theatre,  where,  amid  en- 
thusiasm, Ruskin  gave  a  new  direction  to  work  that 
has  had  permanent  and  far-reaching  effects  upon  his 
countrymen.  Of  his  influence  the  proof  is  our  wonder 
nowadays  that  he  should  have  required,  in  "Modern 
Painters"  and  elsewhere,  to  do  so  much  clearing  of 
the  ground.  His  introduction,  then  requiring  proof 
step  by  step,  has  for  many  of  us  become  axiomatic. 

Very  soon  he  recognised  that  merely  theoretical 
teaching  could  be  of  little  use  unless  it  were  reinforced 
by  the  practical,  and  to  this  end  he  founded  the  Oxford 
School  of  Drawing,  to  which  came  a  fair  number  of 
the  more  enthusiastic  spirits.  The  Professor  was  him- 
self the  drawing- master,  and  he  enriched  his  school 


64  JOHN  EUSKIIST 

with  many  gifts — his  own  sketches,  a  few  examples  of 
Tintoret,  Rossetti,  Burne-Jones,  and  Holman  Hunt. 
Later  he  endowed  the  school  with  a  gift  of  £5000. 
In  spite  of  antagonisms,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that 
in  his  Oxford  work  Ruskin  found  pleasure,  if  not 
happiness.  He  became  the  centre  of  an  interesting 
circle  of  young  men,  who  were  influenced  by  his 
teaching,  ethical  as  well  as  artistic,  and  if  enthusiasm 
sometimes  led  them  into  Quixotism,  well,  then,  their 
state  was  the  more  gracious. 

Quaintest  of  all  the  experiments  in  practising  what 
they  preached  was  the  endeavour  of  Ruskin  and  his 
disciples  to  mend  with  their  own  hands  a  villainous 
piece  of  road  at  Hincksey.  The  fame  of  that  gallant 
deed  reverberated  amid  much  kindly  laughter  into  after- 
times.  The  present  writer,  one  of  a  far  later  brood  of 
undergraduates,  remembers  an  afternoon  at  Hincksey, 
when  he  chanced  in  miry  November  weather  upon  a 
fearful  Slough  of  Despond,  that  might  by  courtesy  have 
been  called  a  highway.  "  That,"  said  a  cynical  senior 
man,  "  is  the  Ruskin  Road."  Many  picks  were  broken 
in  the  work,  and  one  vigorous  but  unwary  devotee, 
it  is  said,  drove  the  other  end  of  the  pick  through 
his  back,  and  was,  alas !  injured  for  life.  But  they 
claimed  to  have  put  the  road  into  decent  order,  at  least 
for  the  time.  It  was  no  part  of  their  scheme  to  take 
that  or  any  other  bad  piece  off  the  Surveyor's  hands. 
Enemies  said  that  the  farmers  laughed  the  undertak- 
ing to  scorn :  the  truth  is,  they  gave  the  workmen  a 
vote  of  thanks  and  made  known  certain  privileges  of 


OXFOED  ONCE   MORE  65 

grazing  rights  which  accrued  to  those  who  kept  up 
the  road.  So  that  even  an  imperfect  feudal  system 
had  provided  some  sort  of  proper  equivalent  in  kind 
as  the  labourer's  reward.  It  was,  as  it  were,  an  in- 
stalment of  the  Ruskin  theory  of  wages. 

Mr.  Ruskin's  breakfasts  at  Corpus  were  famous  for 
their  flow  of  soul,  and  one  wishes  that  the  Oxford  of 
a  more  recent  day  had  had  anything  as  vital  and  in- 
teresting to  offer.  Among  the  young  men  who  came 
under  the  Slade  Professor's  immediate  influence,  two 
of  the  most  notable  were  Mr.  W.  H.  Mallock  and 
the  late  Arnold  Toynbee,  the  latter  of  whom  gave  the 
Ruskin  doctrine  practical  expression  through  his  social 
work  in  the  East  End  of  London.  With  Prince 
Leopold,  Ruskin  also  formed  a  warm  friendship. 

Of  his  later  Oxford  life  Ruskin  has  left  one  very 
amiable  glimpse  in  Prceterita.  He  reveals  himself  as 
unconquerably  shy  amid  the  distinguished  company 
into  which  from  time  to  time  he  was  thrust  by  his 
fame.  For  that  he  blames  his  want  of  early  training 
in  the  mere  amenities  of  society.  It  is  a  story  within 
a  story,  beginning  with  a  dinner  at  Christ  Church, 
given  by  the  Dean  and  Mrs.  Liddell  during  the  visit 
of  the  Princess  of  Wales.  Disraeli  and  Ruskin  were 
among  the  guests  invited  to  meet  her  Royal  Highness. 
"  I  knew  no  more  how  to  behave,"  says  the  Slade 
Professor,  "  than  a  marmot  pup."  Very  soon  Ruskin 
learned  by  intuition  that  a  ripple  of  brighter  conversa- 
tion running  round  the  table  concerned  himself,  and 
a  glance  from  the  Princess  confirmed  his  suspicion. 

E 


66  JOHN  RUSKIN 

Some  one  had  told  a  pleasant  story  at  his  expense : 
how,  an  evening  or  two  before,  the  gay  Professor, 
knowing  that  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Liddell  were  to  dine  at 
Blenheim,  entered  into  a  plot  with  the  Liddell  girls 
to  steal  round  from  Corpus  to  the  Deanery,  where 
there  was  to  be  tea  and  a  little  singing  or  the  like. 
Through  blinding  snow  the  Professor  kept  his  tryst, 
and  a  delightful  evening  was  just  beginning,  when,  lo ! 
re-enter  the  Dean  and  Mrs.  Liddell,  whose  carriage 
could  not  get  farther  than  the  Parks,  owing  to  the 
drifts.  "  How  sorry  you  must  be  to  see  us,  Mr. 
Ruskin ! "  said  Mrs.  Liddell ;  to  which  he  replied,  "  I 
never  was  more  so."  The  Dean  kindly  promised  not 
to  interrupt  the  symposium,  but  the  spell  was  broken, 
and  Ruskin  returned  to  Corpus  disconsolate. 

This  was  matter  after  Dizzy's  own  heart,  and  in 
ten  minutes  he  had  every  detail  perfect,  for  future 
deadly  use. 

But  before  the  Minister  could  strike,  Ruskin  had 
to  run  the  gauntlet  of  a  talk  with  the  Princess,  while 
"the  attendant  stars  and  terrestrial  beings  round, 
listened,  to  hear  what  the  marmot  pup  had  to  say  for 
himself." 

"  In  the  space  of,  say,  a  minute  and  a  half,  I  had 
told  the  Princess  that  landscape  painting  had  been 
little  cultivated  by  the  Heads  of  Colleges, — that  it 
had  been  still  less  cultivated  by  the  Undergraduates, 
and  that  my  young  lady  pupils  always  expected 
me  to  teach  them  how  to  paint  like  Turner  in  six 
lessons." 


OXFOED  ONCE   MORE  67 

Difficulties  assailed  Princess  and  Professor.  Her 
Royal  Highness  bowed  courteously  and  passed  on — to 
the  next  Professor.  "A  blank  space,"  says  Ruskin, 
"  formed  itself  round  me,"  when  suddenly  there  entered, 
in  full  dress,  Miss  Rhoda  Liddell,  "as  exquisite  a  little 
spray  of  rhododendron  ferrugineum  as  ever  sparkled 
in  Alpine  dew." 

"  Disraeli  saw  his  opening  in  an  instant.  Drawing 
himself  to  his  full  height,  he  advanced  to  meet  Rhoda. 
The  whole  room  became  all  eyes  and  ears.  Bowing 
with  kindly  reverence,  he  waved  his  hand  and  intro- 
duced her — to  the  world.  '  This  is,  I  understand,  the 
young  lady  in  whose  art  education  Professor  Ruskin 
is  so  deeply  interested  ! ' 

"And  there  was  nothing  for  me  but  simple  ex- 
tinction, for  I  had  never  given  Rhoda  a  lesson  in  my 
life.  ...  I  could  only  bow  as  well  as  a  marmot  might, 
in  imitation  of  the  Minister,  and  get  at  once  away  to 
Corpus,  out  of  human  ken." 

One  more  glimpse  may  be  given  of  those  Oxford 
days,  or  rather  evenings.  As  far  as  I  am  aware,  it  has 
never  been  made  public,  and  it  may,  I  trust,  be  set 
down  without  offence,  almost  exactly  as  it  occurs  in 
one  of  my  old  diaries,  with  only  some  identifying  and 
too  intimate  details  omitted : — 

To-night  when  I  took  my  usual  verses  to  Mr. 

I  found  him  reading  by  the  light  of  two  wax 
candles— one  long,  the  other  short.  "Look," 
he  said,  "  that  is  how  Ruskin  will  always  have 


68  JOHN  RUSKIN 

it.  He  says  it  is  the  perfect  light  for  the 
student.  He  told  me  so  one  evening  when 
I  called  on  him  in  Christ  Church.  I  had  gone 
in  fulfilment  of  a  promise  to  show  him  the 
silver  pen  with  which  Sir  Walter  wrote  the 
Waverley  Novels.  When  I  entered,  Ruskin 
was  reading  one  of  the  original  manuscripts  of 
the  Waverley  series.  He  took  the  pen,  and 
laying  it  reverently  on  the  page,  said,  '  Ah,  they 
should  never  be  parted.'  And  during  the  whole 
of  that  visit  to  Oxford,  and  indeed  for  some 
time  afterwards,  I  had  to  allow  him  to  keep 
the  pen." 

The  sequel  is  perhaps  rather  more  humorous  and 
characteristic  than  the  part  of  the  story  here  set 
down,  but  the  time  has  not  yet  come  to  tell  the 
whole  of  the  little  comedy.  What  would  have 
happened,  one  wonders,  had  my  tutor  suggested  that 
the  MS.  should  go  with  the  pen,  and  not  the  pen 
with  the  MS. ! 

During  this  period  a  note  of  warmer  regard  for 
Oxford  may  be  traced  in  Ruskin's  words,  but  it  is 
chiefly  the  Cathedral  Church  of  Christ  that  has  his 
affection.  Personally  he  was  beloved,  and  his  work 
was  valued,  and  there  were  many  testimonies  that 
he  had  not  toiled  fruitlessly.  But  that  could  not 
prevent  his  resignation  of  his  Chair,  when  the  Museum 
permitted  vivisection.  And  so  for  conscience'  sake, 
sadly  convinced  that  he  had  laboured  in  vain  for  an 
age  that  took  no  heed  of  his  teaching,  he  parted 


""^ 


n      M      <  1  L4i 

§a     >f 
;  ltOL» 
?\\S^Sl 


OXFORD  ONCE  MORE  69 

company  with  his  University.  That  was  in  1884. 
The  date  somewhat  anticipates  the  course  of  this 
narrative.  During  the  greater  part  of  his  tenure  of 
the  Slade  Professorship  Ruskin's  home  had  been  at 
Brantwood,  near  Coniston.  Thither  we  must  now 
turn,  to  note  the  close  of  his  work  and  of  his  life. 

But  a  word  may  be  said  here  on  the  permanence 
or  otherwise  of  his  teaching.  In  political  economy 
he  is  still  a  force,  but  in  Art  the  times  seem  to  have 
moved  far  away  from  Ruskin.  To-day  we  are  im- 
pressionists, and  even  post-impressionists,  and  those 
who  know  how  to  qualify  aright  the  opinions  of  both 
the  later  schools,  qualify  also  Ruskin's  dogmatic  ad- 
herence to  literal  truth,  and  recognise  that  in  his 
intolerance  of  Whistler  he  missed  the  sublimation  of 
literal  truth  wherein  that  master's  work  is  great.  The 
sanest  criticism  of  the  present  day  is  that  which  holds 
a  balance  between  the  jarring  sects.  It  owes  much 
to  Ruskin  as  an  initial  force,  but  the  narrowness  of  his 
creed  has  mulcted  him,  as  Art  Critic,  in  the  inevitable 
penalty  of  the  bigot. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

GATES    OF   THE    HILLS 

AMID  the  peace  of  the  Lakes,  Ruskin  made  his  home 
during  the  last  and  stormiest  period  of  his  life,  and 
there  through  much  suffering  he  fought  his  way  back 
to  some  reassurance  of  spirit.  His  conflicts  can  be 
traced  only  in  the  barest  outline  here ;  but  first  a 
word  must  be  said  in  description  of  the  Prophet's 
retreat  at  Coniston. 

On  the  margin  of  Coniston  Water,  Brantwood 
stands  solitary  among  its  dark  firs  and  larches,  remote 
by  a  lengthy  drive  from  the  village.  It  is  a  plain 
house,  still  declaring  its  cottage  origin,  and  with  no 
outward  ornament  save  its  turret-room,  once  the 
master's  own.  For  the  house  beautiful,  in  what 
Ruskin  called  the  vulgarly  aesthetic  sense,  he  took 
no  care.  He  was  not  disturbed  by  a  wall-paper  or 
by  early  Victorian  furniture.  The  old  family  things 
served  him  until  the  end,  to  the  grief  of  worshippers 
who  sought  Brantwood  in  the  spirit  of  Bunthorne 
and  Grosvenor.  To  such  he  made  his  position  bluntly 
clear  in  the  preface  to  the  rearranged  edition  of 
"Modern  Painters"  (1883):— 

"  I  am  entirely  independent  for  daily  happiness  upon 

70 


GATES  OF  THE   HILLS  71 

the  sensual  qualities  of  form  and  colour ;  when  I  want 
them  I  take  them  either  from  the  sky  or  the  fields, 
not  from  my  walls,  which  might  be  either  whitewashed 
or  painted  like  a  harlequin's  jacket  for  aught  I  care ; 
but  the  slightest  incident  which  interrupts  the  harmony 
of  feeling  and  association  in  a  landscape,  destroys  it 
all  to  me,  poisoning  the  entire  faculty  of  contempla- 
tion. From  my  dining-room,  I  am  happy  in  the 
view  of  the  lower  reach  of  Coniston  Water,  not 
because  it  is  particularly  beautiful,  but  because  it  is 
entirely  pastoral  and  pure.  Were  a  single  point  of 
chimney  of  the  Barrow  ironworks  to  show  itself  over 
the  green  ridge  of  the  hill,  I  should  never  care  to 
look  at  it  more." 


To  be  fastidious  about  household  gods  while  out- 
side lay  a  miserable  world,  seemed  to  Ruskin  mere 
fiddling  while  Rome  was  burning. 

Within  Brantwood  all  was  solid,  old-fashioned 
comfort,  and,  while  the  master's  strength  endured,  a 
wonderfully  busy  life.  A  company  of  young  people 
helped  Ruskin  in  his  manifold  works  :  and  the  even- 
ings were  merry  in  a  fashion  that  some  would  have 
called  Philistine.  Nigger  melodies  were  not  discour- 
aged, and  there  was  no  pose  of  cleverness  in  the 
conversation.  Down  on  the  lake  Brantwood  had  its 
own  little  harbour  and  fleet  of  boats.  The  afternoons 
were  often  spent  in  wood-chopping  expeditions. 

From  the  earliest  light,  and  sometimes  even  before 
the  dawn,  Ruskin,  who  went  to  bed  at  half-past  ten, 
was  at  work  in  his  study.  It  is  a  long  room,  once, 


72  JOHN  RUSKIN 

too,  hung  with  Turners  and  papered  with  a  design 
taken  from  Marco  Marziale's  "  Circumcision "  in  the 
National  Gallery.  The  furniture  was  red  mahogany, 
the  upholstery  bright-green  leather.  It  was  not  the 
least  beautiful,  but  in  this  very  place  he  could  write 
that  loveliest  and  most  melodious  of  his  briefer  prose 
passages,  beginning :  "  Morning  breaks  as  I  write,  along 
these  Coniston  Fells — "  It  is  familiar  to  everybody, 
and,  alas!  now  grown  somewhat  too  hackneyed  to 
quote  in  full.  Thus,  under  the  shadow  of  Coniston 
Old  Man,  the  prophet  lived  and  worked  and  fought, 
and  at  length  laid  down  his  armour. 

He  saw  himself  in  these  days  "a  man  clothed 
in  soft  raiment — a  reed  shaken  by  the  wind  1 "  The 
words  bring  us  to  those  remarkable  volumes  containing 
the  final  results  of  his  life's  thought  and  teaching,  Fors 
Clavigera.  The  mystical  title,  explained  in  a  true 
Ruskin  etymology,  laborious,  minute,  and  fanciful,  sig- 
nifies "  the  Fate  or  Force  that  bears  the  Club,  or  Key, 
or  Nail :  that  is,  in  three  aspects — as  Following,  or  Fore- 
ordaining, Deed  (or  Courage),  and  Patience,  and  Laws, 
known  and  unknown,  of  Nature  and  life ; — the  Deed  of 
Hercules,  the  Patience  of  Ulysses,  the  Law  of  Lycur- 
gus."  These  letters  to  the  workmen  and  labourers  of 
Great  Britain  were  begun  in  1871,  the  year  before 
Ruskin  settled  at  Brantwood,  and  they  were  continued, 
as  occasion  and  health  served,  through  seven  years. 
The  publication  was  in  parts,  issued  through  the  post, 
at  sevenpence,  later  tenpence,  by  Mr.  George  Allen  for 
Mr.  Ruskin.  He  did  not  advertise  his  curious  magazine, 


GATES  OF  THE   HILLS          73 

trusting,  as  he  said,  to  the  public's  long  nose ;  and  the 
public,  getting  wind  of  the  affair,  came  to  buy.  "  Words 
winged  with  Empyrean  wisdom,  piercing  as  lightning 
— and  which  I  do  not  really  remember  to  have  heard 
the  like  of,"  was  Carlyle's  verdict.  " To  read  Fors" 
says  Mr.  Collingwood,  "  is  like  being  out  in  a  thunder- 
storm." Opinion  was  certainly  tempestuous  enough, 
as  the  scheme  of  these  reforming  papers  gradually 
unfolded  itself.  Some  said  the  sage  was  mad,  as  he 
brought  out  of  his  storehouse  things  new  and  old — 
pastoral,  comical,  historical,  tragical — the  ripe  experi- 
ence of  fifty  years.  The  world  did  ill  to  mock ;  for 
never  was  it  so  generously  taken  into  confidence  by 
any  man  of  genius.  Ruskin  withheld  nothing  that  he 
thought  would  serve  his  countrymen.  Bitterer  than 
all  to  him,  the  working  men  of  Britain  sent  Ruskin  no 
word  of  reply,  and  at  last  he  ceased  to  address  them  as 
"  My  Friends." 

In  this  place  it  is  impossible  to  indicate  all  the  bright 
and  sombre  threads  of  that  wonderful  web,  but  the 
central  purpose  must  be  outlined.  It  was  the  founding 
of  a  practical  scheme  of  social  regeneration,  through 
the  agency  of  St.  George's  Company,  afterwards  called 
the  Guild  of  St.  George.  Ruskin,  Master  of  the  Guild, 
invited  disciples  to  devote  to  the  work  a  tithe  of  their 
means.  He  himself  led  the  way  with  a  tenth  of  his 
remaining  fortune,  once  £200,000.  This  man  clothed 
in  soft  raiment  was  exercised  in  his  mind  as  to  the 
example  of  St.  Francis,  and  set  about  shedding  his 
wealth.  Land  was  bought  for  the  agricultural  members 


74  JOHN  RUSKIN 

of  the  Guild  to  cultivate ;  mills  and  factories  were  to 
be  started  or  acquired  for  the  encouragement  of  labour 
that  should  be,  for  choice,  manual,  although  machinery 
was  not  wholly  forbidden.  Recreation  and  instruction 
were  to  be  provided;  a  coinage  and  a  costume  were 
contemplated,  but  never  realised.  Ruskin  framed  the 
Laws,  on  the  fair  old  model  of  fourteenth-century 
Florence ;  you  may  read  them  in  the  "  Laws  of  Fe'sole." 
It  was  not  Utopian,  except  in  so  far  as  all  such  dreams 
must  be  Utopian  in  this  present  world. 

It  may  not  be  too  fanciful  to  find  the  sum  and 
substance  of  all  Ruskin's  economic  teaching  in  that 
inscription  which  it  was  the  "  pride  of  his  life  "  to  have 
discovered  on  San  Giorgio  di  Rialto.  This,  "  the  first 
word  Venice  ever  speaks  aloud,"  runs :  "  Around  this 
temple  let  the  merchant's  laws  be  just,  his  weights  true, 
and  his  covenants  faithful." 

Some  part  of  Fors*  design  came  into  actual  being 
— the  Sheffield  Museum  is  to-day  its  most  enduring 
memorial;  but  trials  and  disappointments  waited  on 
the  work,  and  brought  the  Master  untold  bitterness. 
In  1877,  what  he  considered  the  treachery  of  a  friend 
so  dejected  him  that  he  all  but  lost  heart.  There  is  of 
that  hard  period  one  curious  documentary  memorial, 
which,  by  the  kindness  of  a  friend,  is  here  reproduced  for 
the  first  time  in  facsimile,  although  the  letter  itself  has 
been  printed  in  "  Arrows  of  the  Chace."  Every  new 
year,  Ruskin  used  to  send  a  message  of  good-will  to 
a  correspondent,  Mr.  John  Leith  of  Aberdeen,  to  be 
read  to  his  class  for  Scripture  study.  For  1878  there 


76  JOHN  RUSKIN 

was  no  cheerful  word;  only  two  lines  from  Horace: 
Epistles  I.  4,  12-13. 

"  Inter  spem  curamque,  tiraores  inter  et  iras 
Omnem  crede  diem  tibi  diluxisse  supremum." 

("Amid  hope  and  sorrow,  amid  fears  and  wrath, 
believe  every  day  that  has  dawned  upon  thee  to  be 
thy  last.") 

He  must  have  been  deeply  distressed  not  to  have 
cared  to  catch  even  the  qualified  optimism  of  Horace's 
very  next  line — 

"  Grata  superveniet  quae  non  sperabitur  hora." 

("  Pleasant  the  advent  of  the  unhoped-for  hour.") 

Trials  drew  close  about  Ruskin  in  that  year,  and  at 
length  ill-health  compelled  him  to  resign  his  Professor- 
ship, to  which  he  had  been  re-elected  in  1 873.  Fors, 
the  Slade  lectures,  and  a  multitude  of  other  interests 
had  claimed  his  unremitting  care,  and  the  result  was  a 
new  and  most  important  body  of  literature.  For  the 
sake  of  keeping  the  record,  the  chief  works  may  be 
merely  named  under  their  years,  together  with  an 
indication  of  Ruskin's  later  journeys  at  home  and 
abroad. 

In  1873  a  lecture,  "Nature  and  Authority,"  was 
delivered  at  the  Grosvenor  Hotel ;  "  Robin,  Swallow, 
and  Chough,"  at  Oxford  and  Eton.  The  Slade  course 
for  the  year  was  the  exquisite  "  Val  d' Arno,"  studies  in 
Tuscan  Art  and  Florentine  History.  In  1874  Ruskin 
revisited  Rome,  and  went  on  to  Sicily.  His  Slade  course 


GATES  OF   THE   HILLS          77 

included  "  Alps  and  Jura "  and  "  Schools  of  Floren- 
tine Art."  At  Eton  he  lectured  on  Botticelli.  In 
1875  he  gave  the  Royal  Institution  his  lecture  on 
"  Glacial  Action."  The  Slade  course  was  "  Sir  Joshua 
Reynolds."  At  Eton  he  delivered  the  "  Spanish 
Chapel."  In  1876  he  lectured  at  Christ's  Hospital  on 
"  Precious  Stones,"  and  at  Woolwich  on  "  Minerals." 
The  same  year  he  made  posting  tours  in  England  and 
revisited  Switzerland.  Part  of  1877  was  devoted  to  a 
study  of  Carpaccio  at  Venice.  He  lectured  at  Kendal 
on  "  Yewdale  and  its  Streamlets."  The  Slade  course 
was  "  Readings  in  Modern  Painters."  "  Streams  of 
Westmorland"  was  given  at  Eton.  In  1878  Ruskin 
visited  Prince  Leopold,  then  very  ill,  at  Windsor.  At 
Hawarden  he  came  to  a  better  understanding  of  Mr. 
Gladstone,  an  incident  generously  recorded  in  Fors, 
and  later  in  a  reprint,  when  the  space  formerly  contain- 
ing some  hard  words  was  left  forever  blank  and  marked 
"  A  memorial  of  rash  judgment."  This  was  the  year  of 
the  Turner  Exhibition  in  Bond  Street,  for  which  Ruskin 
wrote  a  catalogue,  interrupted  by  terrible  illness,  brought 
on  by  innumerable  worries.  On  his  recovery  he  had 
to  face  another  ordeal — the  libel  action  brought  by 
Whistler  for  Fors'  remarks  on  impressionism.  Whistler 
received  a  farthing  damages,  and  an  inspiration,  de- 
veloped later  in  his  "  Gentle  Art  of  Making  Enemies." 
For  a  considerable  time  Ruskin  had  to  take  life  as 
easily  as  he  might,  but  he  was  not  idle.  "  Deucalion," 
studies  of  crystals,  and  "  Proserpina,"  an  original  system 
of  botany,  came  to  birth  in  1879.  1880  saw  "  A  Cau- 


78  JOHN  EUSKIN 

tion  to  Snakes,"  suggested  by  Huxley's  lecture  on  the 
evolution  of  reptiles.  Ruskin's  treatment  of  the  subject 
was  artistic  and  ethical.  He  wrote  also  his  "  Bible  of 
Amiens,"  part  of  his  unfinished  project  "  Our  Fathers 
have  Told  Us,"  and  crossed  swords  with  the  Bishop  of 
Manchester  on  the  question  of  usury.  The  same  year 
he  revisited  Abbeville,  Amiens,  Beauvais,  Chartres,  and 
Rouen.  France  and  Italy  were  in  the  itinerary  of  1882, 
and  he  gave  his  "  Cistercian  Architecture "  before  the 
Royal  Institution.  Next  year  he  was  invited  to  return 
to  his  Professorship,  and  delivered  the  "  Art  of  Eng- 
land." This  year  he  made  his  last  tour  in  Scotland. 
The  Slade  course  for  1884,  the  "  Pleasures  of  England," 
marked  his  final  work  in  Oxford.  He  got  through  it 
without  the  disaster  his  friends  dreaded,  and  was  per- 
suaded to  cancel  certain  lectures  containing  deep  cen- 
sure of  the  times.  His  lecture  the  "  Storm-Cloud," 
given  at  the  London  Institution,  was  ominous  in  its 
title.  For  a  time  clouds  and  darkness  closed  about  the 
mind  of  the  foremost  thinker  of  his  age — foremost  in 
every  sense ;  for  it  was  his  mere  outrunning  of  his 
own  times  that  so  set  men  against  his  teaching. 

Gradually  he  recovered,  and  set  to  work  again, 
writing  at  intervals  from  1885  to  1888  his  incom- 
parable autobiography,  Prceterita,  which  he  intended 
to  bring  down  to  the  year  1879.  But  his  work  was 
done.  At  length  he  acknowledged  that  the  task  was 
beyond  his  powers,  and  with  one  final  effort,  his  beauti- 
ful tribute  to  his  cousin,  Mrs.  Arthur  Severn,  who  had 
been  his  mother's  companion  in  her  last  years,  and  who 


GATES  OF  THE  HILLS          79 

was  to  watch  over  his  own  long  passage  towards  those 
"  Gates  of  the  hills,  whence  one  returns  not,"  Ruskin 
laid  down  his  pen  forever. 

But  the  pilgrimage  had  still  twelve  years  to  run. 
It  is  a  period  of  which  none  should  write  save  those 
who  loved  and  watched  over  Ruskin  in  his  declin- 
ing days  at  Brantwood.  From  Mr.  Collingwood,  his 
secretary,  one  word  may  perhaps  be  borrowed  here,  so 
fitly  does  it  sum  up  all  that  a  writer  from  the  outside 
world  may  dare  to  say : — 

" '  Datur  Hora  Quieti ' :  there  is  more  work  to  do, 
but  not  to-day.  The  plough  stands  in  the  furrow ; 
and  the  labourer  passes  peacefully  from  his  toil,  home- 
wards." 

On  the  20th  of  January  1900  the  end  came,  with- 
out pain  or  farewell.  He  had  wished,  should  he  die 
at  Brantwood,  to  be  buried  in  Coniston  Churchyard ; 
and  there  he  rests,  his  grave  marked  by  a  sculptured 
cross,  of  native  stone,  symbolically  wrought  by  his  own 
artificers  to  commemorate  his  life-work.  There  is  no 
written  epitaph,  merely  his  name  and  the  years  of  his 
coming  and  going. 

Westminster  Abbey  would  have  opened  her  doors 
to  receive  his  dust,  but  when  the  Dean  offered  a  grave, 
the  honour  was  declined.  John  Ruskin's  true  resting- 
place  is  by  the  Gates  of  the  Hills. 


INDEX 


Andrews,  Dr.,  16 

Brantwood,  44,  70 

Cambridge,  42 

Carlyle,  Thomas,  41,  63 

Chamouni,  20,  42,  49 

Christ  Church,  Oxford,  24 

Coniston,  15,  44,  70 

Cox,  Margaret,  afterwards  Mrs.  J.  J. 
Buskin,  5 

Denmark  Hill,  home  at,  38 

Dijon,  48 

Disraeli,  66 

Domecq,  Miss,  29 

Dulwich,  7 

Edinburgh,  41 

Florence,  53 

Fora  Clavigera,  43,  72 

France,  sojourns  in,  46 

Friar'i  Crag,  Derwentwater,  15 

Friendship's  Offering,  young  Ruskin  con- 
tributes to,  22 

Geneva,  46,  49 

Geological  studies,  21 

Herne  Hill,  Ruskin's  early  home  at,  9 

High  Street,  Oxford,  26 

Hincksey,  64 

Hunter  Street,  Ruskin's  early  home,  6 

Italy,  first  visit  to,  20  ;  second  visit,  32  ; 
later  visits,  40,  42,  43,  46 

Keswick,  15 

Maurice,  F.  D.,  41 

"  Modern  Painters,"  34-36,  40 

Oxford  University,  Ruskin  goes  up,  23  ; 
life  there,  24 ;  "  Modern  Painters," 
35 ;  Slade  Professor,  62 

Peckham,  at  school  at,  21 

Perth,  8,  15,  16 

Pisa,  46 

Prceterita,  65,  78 

Richardson,  Jessie,  Ruskin's  aunt,  8 
„          Mary,  Buskin's  cousin,  16 


Rogers,  Samuel,  22 

Rogers'  "Italy,"  18,20 

Rouen,  46 

Runciman,  Ruskin's  first  drawing- 
master,  18 

Ruskin,  John,  birth  and  early  years,  1 ; 
lineage,  4 ;  his  sense  of  form  and 
colour,  7  ;  visits  Perth,  8 ;  goes  to 
live  at  Herne  Hill,  9 ;  discipline,  10  ; 
early  artistic  efforts,  11,  13  ;  tours  in 
England  with  his  parents,  14  ;  on  the 
Continent,  15;  learns  Latin,  15,  Greek, 
17  ;  learns  drawing  under  Mr.  Runci- 
man, 18;  visits  Switzerland,  19,  Italy, 
20;  geological  studies,  21 ;  contributes 
to  Friendship's  Offering,  22 ;  champions 
Turner,  22;  goes  to  Oxford,  23,  ex- 
periences there,  23,  illness,  29,  gradu- 
ates, 31 ;  activities  at  Denmark  Hill, 
38;  "Modern  Painters,"  40,  other 
works,  42 ;  lecturing,  43 ;  Fors  Clavi- 
gera, 43  ;  marriage,  40 ;  Brantwood, 
44 ;  in  France,  Italy,  and  Switzerland, 
46 ;  Professor  at  Oxford,  62;  at  Brant- 
wood, 72 

Ruskin,  John  James,  1,  4,  11,  14,  24 
„       Margaret,  1,  11,  14,  26,  44 

St.  Mark's,  Venice,  56 

Schaffhausen,  19 

Slade  Lectures,  44,  62 

"  Stones  of  Venice,"  40,  44 

Switzerland,  first  visit  to,  21 ;  later 
visits,  41,  42,  43,  46 

Turner,  Ruskin's  first  acquaintance  with 
his  work,  18 ;  his  admiration  for,  20 ; 
champions  him,  22;  acquaintance 
with,  32 

"  Unto  this  Last,"  42,  62 

Venice,  46,  49,  54 

Verona,  46 

Whistler,  J.  M.,  76 


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